r
be University of Cbica^o
Klibrarics
The Prophetic Consciousness
BIBLICAL STUDIES.
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BIBLICAL STUDIES
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BY
M. D. R. WILLINK, S.Tn.
LONDON
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING
CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
NEW YORK AND TORONTO I THE MACMIt/LAN CO.
1924
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Made and Printed n Great Britain at
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
I. THE PROBLEM i
II. SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE . . .10
III. THE FRINGE OF PROPHECY ... 20
IV. FRINGE OF REVELATION .... 27
V. THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE . 43
VI. THE PROPHETIC VISION .... 60
VII. PREDICTION AND INSIGHT ... 78
VIII. THE THIRD DEGREE OF VISION ... 87
IX. ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS . . 97
X. SOME CONSIDERATIONS . . . .no
LIST OF AUTHORITIES
QUOTED AND ABBREVIATIONS
Archbishops' Report on the Evangelistic Work of the Church.
S.P.C.K.
A. M. F. At the Master's Feet. Sundar Singh. Christian Lit. Soc.
of India, 1922.
Barnes. Spiritualism and the Christian Faith. Student Movement.
Bunyan. Grace Abounding. R.T.S.
C. L. F. T. Christian Life, Faith and Thought, being the first part
of the Book of Christian Discipline of the Religious Society of
Friends. Friends' Bookshop, 1922.
C. of S. History of St. Catherine of Siena and her Companions.
Drane. Longmans, 1899.
Cloud. The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. Underbill. Watkins, 1912.
Classics of the Soul's Quest. Welsh.
Curteis. Dissent in its Relation to the Church of England. Mac-
millan, 1872.
Finney. Life of Charles G. Finney. Autobiography. Salvation
Army.
Fox. Fox's Journal (abridged). L. Parker. Salvation Army.
Grellet. Stephen Grellet, abridged by William Guest. Headley,
1903.
H. T. Hudson Taylor in Early Years. Dr. and Mrs. Howard
Taylor. Morgan and Scott.
Holmes. The Presence of God. S.P.C.K., 1923.
Hudson. Psychic Phenomena.
Julian, Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Warrack.
Julian of Norwich. Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers.
Harford. Allenson.
Kerin. The Living Touch. Dorothy Kerin. Bell, 1915.
Mysticism. Evelyn Underbill. Macmillan.
Nor Scrip. Amy Wilson Carmichael. Marshall Bros., 1921.
Pall. Lausiac History of Palladius. Lowther Clarke. S.P.C.K.,
1918.
vii
viii LIST OF AUTHORITIES
P. and R. The Prophet and Religion. Skinner, 1922.
Rel. Con. The Religious Consciousness. Pratt. Macmillan, 1921
Life of Lord Radstock. Mrs. Trotter.
Sadhu. The Sadhu, Streeter and Appasamy. Maemillan, 1921.
Suso. The Life of Blessed Henry Suso. F. T. Knox. Methuen, 1913.
Thouless. Religious Psychology. Thouless.
1000 Miles. A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China. A. E. Glover.
Holness.
T. L. Life of St. Theresa, by herself. Ed. Zimmerman. Baker,
5th edition, 1916.
Int. Cas. The Interior Castle. St. Theresa. Ed. Zimmerman,
Baker, 2nd edition, 1912.
Foundations. St. Theresa, the History of her Foundations.
Trans. Mother Agnes Mason. C.U.P., 1909.
Tauler. Life of Tauler. Winkworth.
Var. James's Varieties of Religious Experience, i vol. edition.
W. Journal of John Woolman. Small edition. Swarthmore Press.
Three Friends of God. Mrs. Bevan.
INTRODUCTION
IT is now a good many years ago since, having to
teach the Old Testament to some fairly advanced
students, I was struck by the similarity between the
descriptions of her experiences given by St. Theresa and
some of the phenomena recorded by the prophets in
connection with their reception of God's message. It
seemed to me more profitable, in trying to form a
theory of inspiration, to seek out facts as to how God
had worked rather than to accept the statements of
authorities, however much respected, as to how He
ought to have worked, or how with our present-day
outlook might be believed to have worked, in making
His way known to men.
The following pages contain some of the examples
collected, purposely chosen from sources varying both
in date and religious outlook ; and, while I am not so
daring as to formulate a theory of inspiration of my own,
it seems to me that it is only on a basis of some such
comparison of actual occurrences that a satisfactory
theory can be built up which will take into account the
facts of spiritual experience.
Two fruitful sources have not been drawn upon here :
James's Varieties of Religious Experience, because I
prefer as far as possible to see my illustrations in their
x INTRODUCTION
contexts ; and the "To His Praise "column in the Life
of Faith, because the contributions to that, being
anonymous, do not easily admit of being verified.
Practically nothing has been said about the dates and
authorship of the Old Testament documents, because
these do not really come into the question. The only
point at issue here is that certain men are said to have
had certain experiences which are described in certain
ways. Have we any reliable evidence of similar ex-
periences more completely described by other writers
from which we can check their statements ?
The Prophetic Consciousness
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM
r I ^HE problem before us can hardly be better set out
1 than by quoting Jeremiah 28.
The scene is in one way modern enough. Two
religious leaders confront each other at an open-air
political meeting in the courts of the Temple. It is
their phraseology, and the conception of politics
on which it is based, that seem so foreign to our
ideas.
It was a few years after the carrying away of the pick
of the nation to Babylon, and one of the speakers,
Jeremiah; the son of Hilkiah, wore on his neck a wooden
yoke, signifying that the remainder of the people must
submit to the yoke of the conqueror. The other
Hananiah, the son of Azzur declared with a fine
flourish : " Thus speaketh the LORD of Hosts, the God
of Israel, saying, I have broken the yoke of the king of
Babylon. Within two full years will I bring again into
this place . . ."all that had been carried away king,
spoil and prisoners. Jeremiah replied: "Amen; the
LORD do so : the LORD perform thy words which thou
hast prophesied. . . . The prophet which prophesieth
of peace, when the word of the prophet shall come to
2 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
pass, then shall the prophet be known that the LORD
hath truly sent him."
For answer Hananiah took the yoke from Jeremiah's
neck and broke it, repeating his prediction. Jeremiah
went away in silence.
" Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah
saying, ' Go, and tell Hananiah, saying, Thus saith the
LORD : Thou hast broken the bars of wood ; but thou
shalt make in their stead bars of iron.' " Jeremiah
returned with his message, adding " Hear now,
Hananiah ; the LORD hath not sent thee ; but thou
makest this people to trust in a lie. Therefore thus
saith the LORD, ' Behold I will send thee away from off
the face of the earth ; this year thou shalt die, because
thou hast spoken rebellion against the LORD.' So
Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh
month."
It all sounds extraordinarily unlike a present-day
scene, and yet, stripped of its old-world dress, it is
extraordinarily modern.
There is the great open-air meeting addressed by
two religious leaders, one of whom declares the state of
society too hopelessly rotten for God to deliver it from
its rightful punishment ; the other, with what doubt-
less appeared to his audience who were no more
dissatisfied with themselves than most people are to
be splendid and patriotic faith, declared that they
had only to believe and God would work a great
deliverance.
What is foreign to our ideas is that both men claimed
to have received their political message from God
Himself. Both introduce their speeches with " Thus
saith the LORD," and the audience accept it as the
natural claim of the man they call a " prophet." Again
THE PROBLEM 3
in chapter 36, 16, Jeremiah has been publishing a series
of his addresses, by the only method then open to him,
that of having them publicly read, and it is thought a
political event of sufficient importance to be brought in
all seriousness to the king.
The prophet was held to have as definite a right to
speak with authority on political or social questions as
a Minister of State,. and throughout the history of the
nation, as long as it had any policy to direct, we find
prophets speaking not only as reformers, but as the
representatives of a Great Power with the ability to
enforce its commands in a small dependency.
Nowadays we are accustomed to hear men appeal to
" Christian principles " in matters of policy, but these
men claimed to have direct revelations from God on the
special points at issue. The assumption is that " The
LORD your God is your King," and at every crisis He
sends a messenger with His directions to His viceroy.
We are told that at first the nation was ruled by
prophets under direct Divine guidance like Moses or
Samuel. Samuel acts as king-maker, and still expects
to guide the policy of the king. Saul is dethroned for
asserting his independence. Later we find David has
at court a series of " seers," Abiathar, Gad, Nathan,
two of whom tell him very unpalatable home-truths.
Later, again, Ahijah announces the division of the king-
dom, and appoints the new king. * Shemaiah forbids the
resulting war. 2 The "disobedient prophet "beards Jero-
boam at the altar of his new sanctuary. 3 Elijah does the
like to Ahab, not once nor twice. Elisha changes the
succession. 4 The prophets freely ad vise or criticise. 5 In
later years their freedom of speech was liable to be
1 i Kings li, 29-30. 2 i Kings 12, 22-24.
3 i Kings 13. * 2 Kings 9.
6 i Kings 20, passim; 21, 1-7 ; 2 Kings 22, 14-20;
4 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
resented, 1 but it made no difference. They looked
upon themselves as watchmen with a responsibility to
God and man.
These men claimed not only to speak God's views
upon the immediate political questions of their own
nation, in which we see that the event generally proved
them right, but on moral and social matters too, and
though they spoke to a small semi-barbarous people, we
are only now beginning to realise how true their teach-
ing was on what does or does not make for national
health. And these pronouncements were not made in
the safe pages of a book, but the prophet confronted
the high-placed evil-doer in person with his "Thus
saith the LORD."
On the same authority they claimed to foretell the
line of God's purpose not only for the individual before
them 2 but for the world. In Isaiah 3 the prophet
in the name of his God throws down the gauntlet
to the gods of the nations, challenging them to fore-
tell the future which He has planned and will bring
to pass.
We find in fact from Genesis to Revelation the
assumption that there is a chain of men to whom God
has directly made known His will. There are often
conflicting claims to be His mouth-piece of which
more later but the writings which have come to us
making that claim do contain what is recognised as
some of the highest moral and spiritual teaching we
possess, that on which our present-day morality is based.
These writings are recognised by the Church as " in-
spired." But the manner of the inspiration is a matter
very much in dispute. How was the message received,
1 i Kings 22, 26-28 ; Jeremiah, passim.
8 i Kings 1 6, i -jo. 8 Isaiah 40, 22-27 ; 46, 9-13.
THE PROBLEM 5
ind what authority had the prophet for believing that
he received it direct from God ?
It is the object of this essay to bring forward certain
evidence which may illustrate the question.
There have been a good many different ways of look-
ing at the question of inspiration. Not so very long
ago, it was generally believed that the prophet was
" a man in the Bible," and therefore quite unlike any
man anywhere else, and Biblical inspiration was little
more than writing at the dictation of the Holy Spirit
what a man himself might or might not understand.
This was in fact a continuation of the Montanist saying,
" I am the lyre and the Spirit is the plectrum." That
position is not yet wholly abandoned.
Then a reaction set in, and it was said that the
prophet was a fairly ordinary man of great spiritual
insight and poetical power which he used with
sanctified common sense, but he never literally
heard the voice of God. It was only his way of
expressing himself. People do not hear in that
way.
Next came the Spiritualists, making claim to powers
of communication with the spiritual world, but these
powers are for the most part exercised unconsciously by
the medium in trance, or by automatic writings, and
have been so exercised for thousands of years ; many
of their writings, too, are of a highly didactic though
not always very original character. They claim that
man can hear supernatural voices.
But beside the Spiritualists arose the Psychologists,
and to every claim made by seer or medium they
opposed the mysterious words " suggestion " or " sub-
consciousness."
These worcls open up very large questions, but for the
6 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
present purpose it is enough to notice three fnain points.
The theory of suggestion teaches that :
(i) In certain circumstances I can make myself
believe what I like.
(ii) In certain circumstances I can make you
believe what I like, either by direct action or by tele-
pathy, my thoughts filtering into your mind without
either of us knowing it.
(iii) If enough of us believe something; if "every-
body does it " or " they say so," we suggest ideas to
each other and make each other believe them, and it is
sometimes very hard to recognise that there is no real
authority for the thing said or done.
" That," says the objector, " is what happens to
your medium or to your prophet . It is considered to be
the right thing for him to hear or see in a certain way ;
he expects it, other people expect it, so he does hear
and see things, but they are all bred in his own brain."
Now that sort of reasoning would quite account for
Hananiah. He had in the great historical deliverance
under Isaiah a certain ground for his teaching. He
very much wanted it to be true ; so did his audience.
It was exactly their idea of what a God ought to do
for His people, and Hananiah may honestly have
persuaded himself that God had told him He
would so do.
But does it account for Jeremiah ? He did not want
to speak, nor others to hear, his message. Or does it
account for all the other facts ? for there are other
facts to be taken into consideration which will be
brought forward in due course. All mills may work on
much the same principle, but the corn they grind comes
from very various places.
THE PROBLEM 7
As to the subconsciousness, or unconscious mind
being the source of prophetic messages, while Hudson
in his Psychic Phenomena some years ago was
prepared to allow that the "subjective mind" was
more idealistic than the objective, the present-day
schools seem to teach that it is considerably less so
that it is in fact a hiding-place for what we do not want
to have in our conscious minds. Professor Pratt
speaks of dissociated personalities, suggesting that the
" presence of a dissociated complex is sufficient to
explain a vision," or again, he refers it to the "subcon-
scious mechanism." " The prophet ponders long over
the condition of his people, the will of God, and the
problem of his own duty. Then some day suddenly
the sought-for solution rushes into his mind he finds a
message ready-made upon his tongue, and it is almost
inevitable that he should preface it with the words :
' Thus hath Yahweh showed me ' ! J>1
But as Prof. Pratt elsewhere points cut, 2 our being
able to describe a mental process does not prove that the
matter with which it is concerned is not real. " May it
then perhaps be that the mystics are the seers of our
world, and that whenever they open the eyes of their
souls, the Eternal Light pours in." I may analyse the
mental processes by which I choose a particular tram,
but my catching a perfectly real tram is a fact. Have
we grounds for saying that prophets and apostles had
as good evidence for their statements as I have for
saying " That is a tram which will take me to the
Embankment " ? St. Paul makes the claim perfectly
clearly : " The gospel which is preached of me is not
after man. For I neither received it of man, neither
was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." 3
1 Rel. Con., p. 65. 2 Ibid., p. 458, 3 Gal, i, 11-12.
8 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
And he distinguishes clearly between revelation and
conclusions arrived at by ordinary processes of thought.
" Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of
the Lord : yet I give my j udgment . " x
As Christians we are committed to a belief in a
spiritual world, a higher state of being in which live
God, angels, and departed spirits, but of whose nature
we know very little. But we may believe that God did
not leave Himself without means of making His will
known to His creatures, and if we are in future to live
under those conditions it is not impossible that we may
already have in embryo some powers. belonging to the
state for which we are destined, and with which some
of us at least may be able to apprehend communications
from it.
But how ?
Opinions differ very much. Canon Barnes, speaking
on Spiritualism, says that even if there is an influence of
the departed "it is almost certainly a diffused atmo-
sphere such as that with which the Holy Spirit surrounds
us when we try to know, serve and love God. We may
expect to experience it in its power to guide will and
feeling rather than to convey specific ideas." 2
Dr. Skinner considers that communications were
much more definite. Writing on Numbers 12, 6-8, he
says : <f We may reasonably hold that in face to face
converse with Yahwe, that comprehensive insight into
His purpose which are there attributed to Moses, we
have the typical representation of what Jeremiah re-
garded as the essence of true prophecy." 3
Leaving theory, let us come to facts. The series of
people from Genesis to Revelation who claimed to have
1 i Cor. 7, 25.
* Spiritualism and the Christian Faith, p. 35.
3 P. and R., p. 197. See also pp. 221, 222.
THE PROBLEM 9
immediate intercourse with God did not cease with the
close of the New Testament canon. It has continued
until the present day, and by some of them details
have been given of the manner in which they received
communications and how they judged of their truth,
which coincide with the scanty data given by the
prophets, who were generally more interested in the
matter than the manner of their messages. It is the
intention of the following pages to bring forward a little
of the evidence from these sources in the hope that it
may throw light on the vexed question of prophetic
inspiration.
CHAPTER II
SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE
IN Deuteronomy two rough tests are given by which
to judge whether a man claiming to be a prophet
is really speaking from the Lord or not. (i) The
teaching must be continuous with what has gone before;
it must not contradict God's previous revelations of
Himself. 1 (2) It must be verified, either by a sign
or by its actual working out. 2 The same principles
are accepted in the New Testament ; the first by our
Lord in His controversy with the Pharisees, when He
claimed that His teaching was continuous with the
Law, while theirs nullified it, 3 and the second by His
use of signs, not only in the case of the sick of the
palsy 4 but elsewhere . 5
The complementary side of the test is to be found
in the fate of the sons of Sceva. 6 The Name of God
will not allow itself to be used in vain . 7
If we adopt these tests we at once rule out from our
inquiry a number of utterances coming from seances
and automatic writing. But we leave in a number of
orthodox and edifying reflections which have " come
into " people's minds, and which are in accordance
with actual events because they are probably an up-
1 Deut. 13, 1-3. 2 Deut. 18, 20-22.
3 Mark 7, 1-13 ; cp. i John 4, 2-3.
4 Mark 2, 9-12. Gp. John 3, 2 ; 5, 36.
8 Acts 19, 13-16. 7 Cp. Mark 9, 38-39.
10
SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 11
rising in the conscious mind of principles learnt from
the study of books which have been inspired in the
Biblical sense. These must also be excluded. They
are not " prophetic," merely reminiscent.
But from the first days of the Church to our own
time there have been men and women who have
claimed to hear the word of God, and who' give the
criteria by which they have learnt to distinguish a
genuine revelation from a merely imaginary one, and
from them our illustrations will for the most part be
taken. Some of them are pre-Reformation mystics,
and in one way their evidence is more valuable in con-
firmation of the prophetic hints than that of members
of the Reformed Churches, because sometimes, as in the
case of St. Theresa, their acquaintance with the Old
Testament was too slight for them to colour their
accounts with reminiscences of Old Testament phraseo-
logy as did Fox and Hudson Taylor, who are soaked
in it.
It is noticeable, too, that many of the great mystics
do not look upon such phenomena of revelation as
at all a necessary sign of, or accompaniment to, a
high degree of spirituality. " There are many saints
who do not know what it is to receive one such favour,
while others who receive them are not saints at all,"
says St. Theresa, 1 and both she and the author of the
Cloud of Unknowing say that if people are bent
on having such " favours " the devil is perfectly ready
to supply them to those who do not know how to
distinguish between the false and the true. " All
other comforts, sounds, and gladness and sweetness,
that come from without suddenly and thou wettest
never whence, I pray thee have them in suspect. For
1 Int. Cas., VI, ix, 19.
is PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
they may be both good and evil ; wrought by a good
angel if they be good, and by an evil angel if they be
evil," 1 and " the devil hath power to feign some false
light or sounds, sweet smells in their noses," etc., if
they are bent on having them, and at the same time
" The remembrance of God will he not put from them,
for fear that he should be had in suspect, and him
list not to let himself," 2 and so he gradually works
them into error.
As a protection against this deception the mystics
tell of an experience which is different in kind.
Fox, speaking of a discussion at Swarthmore in 1652
with some " priests," says he asked them " whether
any one of them could say he ever had the word of the
Lord to go and speak to such and such a people ?
None of them durst say he had, but one of them burst
out into a passion, and said he could speak his
experience as well as I. I told him experience was one
thing, but to receive and go with a message, and to
have a word from the Lord as the apostles and prophets
had and did, this was another thing. And therefore
I put it to them again, could any of them say he had
ever had a command or word immediately from the
Lord at any time ? but none of them could say so." 3
St. Theresa speaks to the same effect of both vision
and audition. " One who very lovingly asks something
of our Lord may fancy that an answer comes from
Him. This often occurs, but I think that no one
accustomed to receive divine communications could
be deceived on this point by the imagination," 4 and
some people with vivid imaginations " feel certain they
see whatever their fancy imagines. If they had ever
1 Cloud, p. 225. 2 Cloud, p. 238.
8 Fox, p. go. * Int. Cas., VI, iii, 17.
SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 13
beheld a genuine vision they would recognise the
deception unmistakably." 1 In fact there is very little
which later writers can say about auto-suggestion in
this matter which St. Theresa has not taken into
account in her books. But both she and some of our
modern teachers say there is a genuine experience.
"There is generally something proper to itself and
belonging to no other in the tone of a human voice,"
says Fr. Holmes. 3 "It can rarely be described, and
no one can explain with scientific accuracy why he
knows that it is that voice and no other that he has
heard. Experience testifies that it is the same with
the voice of the Divine Friend ; it is His and none
other's ; they know His voice."
Sundar Singh confirms what the author of the
Cloud of Unknowing says about false ecstasy :
" No longer now, but frequently some years ago,
before getting into the state of ecstasy, I used to hear
voices and that with these ears (that is, not in the
spiritual language of the heavenly world), and see
lights or hear music, and I found out that this was due
to Satan or some evil spirit. ... I think there is some-
thing in the heart which enables one to judge instinc-
tively whether such experiences are from God or not.
I somehow felt that these were not from God. As
soon as I heard the voice I recognised that it was
not Christ's voice. The sheep hear His voice and re-
cognise it. Mary thought that the man she saw in
the garden was the gardener, but as soon as He began
to speak she knew that it was Christ." 3
The authors of "The Sadhu," in speaking of this
claim, say that Sundar Singh does believe himself to
1 Int. Cas., VI, ix, 6.
2 Presence of God, p. 89.
* Sadhu, p. 150.
14 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
have spiritual experiences analogous to those of the
writer of the Apocalypse. "If so it follows that a
study of the Sadhu's experience will throw light on
the psychological mechanism through and by means
of which religious truth was mediated to certain of
the Biblical writers." 1 " His visions are those of a
personality completely unified ... in deep conscious
communion with his Lord . . . the same psychological
principles have determined the form, and exactly the
same factors of personal conduct, character, and con-
centrated devotion account for the value ... of the
visions in the Bible. We should connect this with
the conception of Inspiration as being essentially a
hyper-stimulation of the natural faculties of insight
and understanding which, in men of high ideals schooled
by the discipline of a noble life, must inevitably follow
from personal communion with a personal Divine.
And lastly, we should urge that the supreme degree
of Inspiration which characterises the great Hebrew
writers is mainly conditioned by their standard of
conduct sane, stern, but, for that age, humane by
their intense concentration of interest on moral and
religious issues, and by their deep experience of com-
munion with the Divine." 2 All these last points will
be seen to be borne out by the evidence of the prophets
themselves.
In trying to account for the phenomena of inspira-
tion much use has been made of the phenomena of
clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, thought trans-
ference, suggestion, the work of the unconscious mind
and so on, and we may have cause to believe that
some of the accounts of the signs done by the prophets
were due to one or other of these powers. Part of the
1 " Sadhu," p. 114. 2 Ibid., p. 145.
SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 15
wads of Samuel 1 might be ascribed to powers of
clairvoyance ; so might Ahijah's recognition of the wife
of Jeroboam ; 2 Elisha was almost certainly both
clairvoyant and clairaudient. 3 It may well be, too,
that many of our Lord's signs of healing were wrought
by the power of suggestion. But does this idea of the
Divine economy lessen the authority of the sign of
the prophet ? We have no right to debar God from the
right to work by one -of His own laws because we have
found out that we are more wonderfully made than
we had thought. After all, God set in order the laws
of psychology which we are just discovering, and has
been working through them all down the ages. We
are like the Bourgeois Gentilhomme when he discovered
that he had been speaking prose " all my life without
knowing it." It is more than likely that a man was
called to be a prophet because the possession of such
gifts was a special qualification for the office. Just
as some of us have an extra range of musical sensi-
tiveness or artistic power, so it is in spiritual things.
While many of us have occasional spiritual experiences
which are above the ordinary level of our everyday
life, some people have, as it were, an extra range
of sight and hearing. Their eyes and ears are,
as Elisha said, " open." 4 It all depends on
the use they make of their power what kind of
things they will see, whether they will see truth or
falsehood.
If then, without going into details of the exact
mode, we accept it as a working hypothesis that there
are some people who can both hear and see things
which others cannot, and yet \vhich are proved by
1 i Sam. 9, 15 to 10, 9. 2 i Kings 14, 6.
3 2 Kings 5, 26 ; 6, 12. 32. 4 2 Kings 6, 17.
i6 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
the event to give them true information, we find
they are divided into two groups :
1. Those who without being especially spiritual
may hear or see once or twice. These are not prophets
as a rule. The message is often individual, and no
particular conditions are required, except that there
is a need for that person to know or do something,
and there is no other means of making it known to
him. For instance, during the war many people
heard stories of men who had been saved from death
by hearing their names called and being thus led out
of the range of some shell ; others have received intima-
tions of deaths, or special guidance in emergencies.
The experience is generally a private one.
2. There are also those who hear frequently. In
Old Testament times the prophet held that he was
responsible to the nation for his power of vision. He
was a watchman, and they had a right to expect of
him that he would "stand on his tower," and pass
on to them any warning or command that he received
from the Lord. 1 His message is one of more than per-
sonal importance ; he sees for the sake of his people.
Therefore he must, as it were, go into training, and we
find that the prophets denounce certain things as
hindering, or even shutting off vision. The condition
of such prophecy was, as Dr. Skinner says, "the
illumination of the whole conscious mind by the spirit
of God." 2 Any kind of self-interest and self-indul-
gence obscured the vision. The man who divined for
hire and made his living by " spacing " could not
expect revelations from the Lord. 3 Drink shuts the
eyes. 4 The man who consistently speaks the smooth,
1 Ezek. 3, 17 ; 33, 2-9 ; Hab, 2, i ; Isa. 21, 6-12.
2 P. and R., p. 222. 3 Micah 3, 5-8 ; Jer, 8, 10.
* Isa. 28, 7, -whence succeeds Isa. 29, 9-11.
SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 17
popular thing when he should take the message of
reproof, especially when he combines it with a sharing
in the sins he ought to have reproved, 1 can have no
revelation, 2 or again, as St. Paul says, 3 the "natural
man " does not naturally see spiritual things. The
popularity hunter could not be a true watchman. 4
So the prophet had to be a man of disciplined life
as well as spiritual fervour, and this agrees with what
we find in the lives of later men and women who have
claimed to receive direct guidance from God. Apostles,
mediaeval mystics, early Quakers, Bunyan, Grellet,
China Inland Missionaries and others who will be quoted
were all men and women living with a single eye to the
glory of God and freely enduring hardness in obedience
to it.
One thing is to be noted. People did not undertake
this life with a view to receiving visions and revelations.
As has been said above, many of them looked upon
such things as " favours " not to be expected or de-
sired, though they might be gratefully received. St.
Theresa says that a person who very strongly desires
such gifts is " certain to be deceived, or at least is in
great danger of delusion " either from the devil or
from auto-suggestion. The vision is the outcome of a
life lived in relation with God. The life comes first,
the visions and auditions may or may not follow.
Brainerd had none, nor had Therese of Lisieux.
It is noteworthy that what to them was, and has
ever since been held to be, a special favour from God,
was to the prophets a duty, and not always a welcome
one. Herein is the safeguard of the claim of the prophets
to originality, which some may think endangered by
1 Jer. 14, 13-16.
2 Jer. 23, 9-40 ; Ezek. 13, 1-23 ; Lam. 4, 13-14.
8 i Cor. 2, 14. * Lam. 2, 14.
i8 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
saying that others have held direct communion with
God after a similar fashion. Does it lessen the origin-
ality of Newton that others have carried on his dis-
covery of gravitation, or of Lister that now all surgeons
use antiseptics ? Only one man could discover that
the earth goes round the sun, or be first at the North
Pole. The prophets were the pioneers of new truth.
Men have learnt from God since, and the standard by
which they have tested the teaching has been its
correspondence with that already given to the prophets.
Christ Himself declared that the proof of the validity
of His teaching was its continuity with what had been
revealed before, whereas the " tradition " of the
Pharisees was a perversion of their own. 1
Not only so, but the Bible is still God's instrument
in these further revelations. It is notable how many
of the auditions recorded by other servants of God are
in the words already used and recorded by these
prophetic pioneers. As Fr. Holmes says, " It is not to
be used only as a record of what He has said in the
past ; it is the instrument through which He speaks
with a living Voice to-day. ... It is attested by the
experience of millions that the Supreme Personality
uses this book to speak with living tones to the sons of
men." 2 Here is an instance. During the Boxer
rebellion a China Inland Missionary and his family
underwent a terrible time of hunting and persecution,
recorded in A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China.
Their minds were well stored with the words of the
Bible, and the whole account is full of the ways in
which these were used not only for comfort but for
actual direction in cases of emergency. "Through
the written word laid up in our hearts, the Eternal
1 Mark 7, 9 etc. 2 Pres., p. 23.
SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 19
Word manifested to us both Himself and the Father. . .
It was literally as though I heard His living voice
beside me. Now He was breathing in my ear ' Fear
not them which kill the body ' . . . "and so on. 1 The
same use is seen throughout Bunyan's experience in
Grace Abounding, and also in Amy Wilson Car-
michael's Nor Scrip.
It is sometimes objected that the prophets expected
to hear, and heard what they expected. That is of
course part of Jeremiah's indictment of the false
prophets, 2 and St. Theresa gives it as one of the reasons
for not seeking to have such favours. But, on the other
hand, no one blames botanists or astronomers for
finding some object just because they looked carefully
for it, and why should the spiritual discoverer's finding
be more suspect than theirs ? Sometimes, too, the
vision or call came when it was not expected. To
Amos, 3 Paul, 4 Isaiah, 5 the word came suddenly, and
sometimes, as St. Theresa says : " A person who is in
no way expecting such a favour, nor has ever imagined
herself worthy of receiving it, is conscious that Jesus
Christ stands by her side." 6
It appears then that as the same two instruments
are at work the Spirit of God and the mind of man
we may hope to find in the records of later communi-
cations something that may throw light on the method
by which the revelations recorded in the Bible were
received, and some explanation of the expressions used
by the recipients.
1 1000 Miles, p. 134.
2 Jer, 14, 13-15 ; 23, 16. Ezek. 13, 3.
3 Amos 7, 15. * Acts 9, 1-9.
6 2 Kings 20, 1-5. 6 Int. Cas., VI, viii, 2.
CHAPTER III
THE FRINGE OF PROPHECY
(a] ECSTATIC ACTIONS
BEFORE going on to deal with the phenomena
of the revelations to the greater prophets it will
be well to consider some of what might be called the
fringes of prophecy, the prophetic gilds and occasional
manifestations.
These gilds, with their exciting " prophesyings " as
recorded in I Samuel, have been declared to be very
like, and possibly not much more spiritual than, the
proceedings of dervishes in much the same neighbour-
hoods. But a closer examination will show resem-
blances to incidents much nearer home. There was, it
is generally admitted, some kind of a revival under
Samuel, and to go no further for convenience of
reference very marked similarities to much of what
is recorded can be found in Appendix I to the
Archbishops' Report on the Evangelistic Work of the
Church in which accounts are given of the phe-
nomena accompanying revivals from the times of the
Franciscans.
The chief passages in question are i Samuel 10, 5-13 ;
19, 20-24.
The chief items seem to be the use of music and the
infectious character of the singing, so that a man
20
THE FRINGE OF PROPHECY 21
like Saul, who afterwards showed himself to be of an
unstable mental balance, was twice carried away by it.
Anyone who has at all followed the course of twen-
tieth-century revival campaigns will remember how
large a part singing has taken in them, and the extra-
ordinary effect it has on many temperaments. The
work of Alexander the choirmaster was as effective as
that of Torrey or Chapman. Moody and Sankey are
inseparably connected, while all revival meetings of a
certain type, missions, and the meetings of the Keswick
Convention seem to be inevitably and of set purpose
preceded by prolonged singing of a particular kind of
" mission " hymn, one feature of which is that it nearly
always has either a very marked staccato rhythm (an
irreverent person not affected by music said that in
writing a Keswick tune the first thing seemed to be to
put a dotted note about the middle of every line and
write the rest of the tune round it) or a swinging waltz
time. What is that but the rhythm of the harp and
timbrel of the early sons of the prophets ? And now,
as then, it has strong effects on those who are set to
that key by nature . The Franciscan revival went ahead
to the hymns of God's " jongeleurs " ; Wesley's revival
was the cause of an outbreak of hymnody; Moody
and Sankey sang thousands into conversion ; the
Welsh revival services consisted almost entirely of '
singing and prayers. As Prof. Pratt says : " By sing-
ing out at the top of his voice the sentiments and ideas
which the revivalist desires to instil into him, each
member of the audience suggests them to himself in
the technical meaning of that phrase." 1 And he says
it is a perfectly sound and legitimate psychological
method,
1 Rel. Con., pp. 176-7.
22 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Then follows the instance of Elisha in the wilderness
of Edom, calling for a musician before he could tell the
three kings what course to pursue. 1 This is sometimes
taken to prove that the prophet wished to be thrown
into a kind of hypnotic trance before he could produce
an oracle. The actual case seems to be much more
commonplace. We do not know how Elisha came to
be there with the army, but he seems to have been in
a very bad temper with Joram, which suggests that
under the then conditions of universal military service
he had been called up against his will for an ex-
pedition of which he disapproved. Be that as it may,
he was distinctly ruffled, and the aim of the minstrel
was probably to quiet his nerves and temper till he was
sufficiently calm to hear spiritual communications.
Another feature of the early prophesyings in Samuel
was the way in which people were impelled to fall on
their faces before the meeting. This has its parallel
in several modern instances. Speaking of the Irish
revival of 1857-9, * ne Archbishops' report quotes : "a
great number in this neighbourhood ... are ' smitten
down ' suddenly, and fall as nerveless and paralysed
and powerless as if killed instantly by a gunshot ; they
fall with a deep groan." 2 In the account of the
" Master and the Man," usually taken as the story of
Tauler's conversion, much the same thing is described
.as happening at his second sermon after his conversion. 3
Finney gives several instances quite as striking, 4 and
similar things happened under Wesley's early preaching
till he put a stop to it. 5 R. H. Thouless quotes this
of the Kentucky revival of 1801.
" The whole body of persons who actually fell help-
1 2 Kings 3, 15. a p. 51.
3 Tauler, pp. 93-94. * Finney, pp. 84-95, 126, 135, etc.
6 Curteis, pp. 372-5.
THE FRINGE OF PROPHECY 23
less to the earth during the progress of the meeting
was computed to be ... 3000 persons, about I in 6.
... At no time was the floor less than half covered.
Some lay quiet, unable to speak or move. Some talked
but could not move. Some beat the floor with their
heels. Some, shrieking in agony, bounded about like a
live fish out of water. Many lay down and rolled over
and over for hours at a time." 1
So these early manifestations seem to have been only
the quite natural and spontaneous accompaniments of
revival in many other places the coming of a new
spiritual force into contact with a mental mechanism
not accustomed to it, and unable to adapt itself at first
to new conditions. Later in Israel they seem to have
become more systematised, as regular " methods," and
closely assimilated to those of the heathen outside.
There is not a very great deal to choose between the
performances of the prophets of Baal on Carmel, 2 and
of the so-called prophets of the Lord in the gate at
Samaria, 3 and from the time of Amos to that of Ezekiel
we find the greater prophets continually confronted
with a succession of men whom they denounced as
prophesying falsehoods. It was then, of course, a
temptation for a shrewd fellow with some psychic
powers and the capacity for working himself up into
the requisite frenzy to set up as a prophet, just as now
he might set up as a " psychic " to get a living. They
were not necessarily all deliberate frauds ; like Mr
Sludge they may have felt that there was more in it
than they knew.
These pseudo-prophets and prophetesses apparently
held what we should call regular seances. 4 Jeremiah
1 Davenport, Prim. Traits in R.R. Thouless, p. 155.
2 i Kings 1 8, 26-9. 3 i Kings 22, 6-12.
4 Isa. 8, 19; Ezek. 13, 17.
24 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
says they went about trying to steal from each other
any hint of what might be a genuine revelation or
dream, 1 and the oracles or " burdens " they produced
were strikingly in accordance with what they and their
clients thought ought to be God's course of action, as
St. Theresa says " when people strongly desire a thing,
the imagination makes them fancy they see or hear it,
just as when a man's mind is set on a thing all day he
dreams of it at night." 2 If the man cannot raise a
dream himself, both she and the author of the Cloud
of Unknowing say the devil is quite ready to supply
what is wanted. We do not generally admit his work-
ing nowadays in such unqualified fashion, but if man's
mind is open to suggestion from incarnate intelli-
gences, why not also from discarnate, and that of two
kinds, good and bad ? Spiritualistic evidence gives at
least an air of probability to the work of some such
agencies.
One of the most interesting of these men on the
fringe of prophecy is Balaam, He appears to have been
what Hudson would call a trance speaker, with possibly
some real knowledge of the One God in him. He came
from Pethor in the borders of the kingdom of the
Mitanni, from whence came the queens of Amenhoteps
I and II who are suspected of bringing in their train
some of the monotheistic ideas which were more fully
developed by Akhnaton. It was also not very far from
Haran, the traditional starting-place of Abraham, and
dwelling-place of Laban, hence there may have been
some tradition of the God worshipped by them. For
if a curse was to be really effectual it was necessary to be
able to use the name of the God under whose protection
the person to be cursed lay, and it may well have been
1 Jer. 23, 30. 2 Int. Cas., VI, ix, 15.
THE FRINGE OF PROPHECY 25
that all the trouble of calling Balaam from a distance
instead of employing local talent was undertaken be-
cause he was supposed to know the name of Israel's God.
Balaam is careful to safeguard himself by disclaiming
any personal responsibility for what he says. 1 When it
comes to the point he goes " to meet with enchant-
ments." 2 Evelyn Underhill says 3 that the object of
the incantation used by a magician is not that it shall
have an effect on the spirits invoked, but that it shall
act as a kind of transmuting agent on the magician
himself, whereby his mind is set free from things of the
earth plane to operate on the psychic plane. Whatever
he expected, Balaam describes himself as "falling
down," possibly in a trance, and the translators do not
seem to be sure whether his eyes are opened to spiritual
things or shut to earthly. In any case we are told that
his power of trance speaking was for once not amenable
to the suggestions of those about him, and he delivered
an oracle very far from what was desired, apparently
without his own volition.
This is in marked contrast to the accounts given by
the Hebrew prophets from Moses onward. In every
case they are represented as understanding what they
are saying. They ask questions and are given at all
events some explanation of the reason for what they are
to say. St. Paul in later days writes : " The spirits of
the prophets are subject to the prophets," 4 in direct
contrast to the prevailing Gentile idea, afterwards
developed by the Montanists, and now held by some
Pentecostal groups, that the more really inspired a
man was the less control he had over himself.
This idea of control and understanding comes out in
1 Num. 22, 18. 38. 2 Num. 24, i.
3 Mysticism, p. 189. 4 i Cor. 14, 32.
26 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
the contrast between the controlled bearing and con-
sidered utterance of the greater prophets whenever we
find them set in controversy with their opponents.
St. Theresa has interesting remarks on both these
points.
She strongly counsels anyone who thinks he is being
given revelations not to attend to them. This is quite
possible if they are self -suggested, but " This is not
feasible when these communications come from the
Holy Ghost ; who when He speaks, stops all other
thoughts and compels the mind to listen ... the soul
can do nothing, nor has it ears to stop, nor power to
think of aught but what is said to it . ' ' 1 This is the exact
opposite to the counsel given by the Tongues Move-
ment. But the prophet must understand as well as
hear. Some things revealed she says cannot be under-
stood " in a way that can be told, but they do make a
deep impression." " Neither was Moses able to relate
more than God willed of what he had seen in the
burning bush, but unless the Almighty had clearly
revealed certain mysteries to his soul, causing it to see
and know its God was present, the lawgiver could never
have undertaken so many and such great labours." 2
1 Int. Cas., VI, iii, 27. 2 Ibid., iv, 5-7.
CHAPTER IV
FRINGE OF REVELATION
(b) EXTERIOR VISIONS AND AUDITIONS
r I A HE prophets themselves give but few details as
JL to the manner in which they received their com-
munications, but by comparing what few data they do
give with those given by later persons it is possible to
arrive at some idea of how they heard and saw spiritual
things.
Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century writes
of her Revelations of Divine Love 1 : "All the blessed
teaching of our Lord was shewed by three parts :
that is to say, by bodily sight, and by word formed in
mine understanding, and by spiritual sight. For the
bodily sight I have said as I saw as truly as I can ; and
for the words I have said them right as our Lord
shewed them to me ; and of the spiritual sight, I have
told some deal, but I may never fully tell it," or, as she
says in another place, " the spiritual sight I may not
and cannot shew it unto you as openly and as fully as
I would."
St. Theresa gives the same evidence. God arouses
the soul " by means of words addressed to the soul in
many different ways ; sometimes they appear to come
from without, at other times from the inner depths of
1 Chapter 73,
27
28 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
the soul, or again from its superior part, while other
speeches are so exterior as to be heard by the ears like
a real voice. At times, indeed, very often this may be
only a fancy, especially with persons of a lively imagina-
tion or who are afflicted with melancholy to any marked
extent," 1 To these latter she says no attention should
be paid they should be told not to trouble themselves
about it, for " any kind I mentioned may come either
from God, the devil, or the imagination," and she goes
on to describe the means of distinguishing the source
from which they come,
Prof. Pratt has no place for the devil in his account
of these " abnormalities," He uses the subconscious
self and dissociated personality to account for them to
some extent. " The phenomena which I have here in
mind are such things as violent but unaccountable
impulses to do certain things, fixed ideas whose source
cannot be traced, 'inspirational speaking/ so far as
this is not to be accounted for by the ordinary laws of
association, motor automatisms, visions and the like.
These all bring with them the sense of external origina-
tion. . . . Moreover, all the phenomena above referred
to have parallels in non-religious cases, where the
explanation is plainly to be had in terms of dissocia-
tion of consciousness. . . . The 'inspiration' of the
prophet, like that of the poet or of the inventor, often
seems to have its immediate source in the deeper and
unconscious parts of his being." The prophet ponders
over the state of his people . ' ' Then some day suddenly
the sought-for solution rushes into his mind he finds
a message ready-made upon his tongue, and it is
almost inevitable that he should preface it with the
words : ' Thus hath Yahweh showed me ' ! " 2
1 Int. Cas., VI, iii, 1-4. 2 Rel. Con., pp. 64, 65.
FRINGE OF REVELATION 29
This would doubtless account for many of what
St. Theresa would call "imaginary" revelations
which, as she says, may be quite edifying in themselves,
but does not account for the new matter which is the
distinguishing note of the true prophet. Prof. Pratt
ascribes much of the " inspiration " of which we are
accustomed to speak to dissociation of personality,
though at the same time he owns that " In the case of
some noble but psychopathic personalities the split-off
states do seem to be of real use, though even here it
must be remembered the highest and noblest part of
the man is his conscious personality. Especially in
the case of many great religious leaders do we find
psychopathic conditions that seem to have contributed
a good deal toward making them the useful men they
were. Consider, for example, Ezekiel, Mohammed,
George Fox, St. Paul the reader will be able to add
to the list many other names." 1
Yet in spite of this he is bound to say on a later page :
" May it then be that the mystics are the seers of our
world, and that whenever they open the eyes of their
souls, the Eternal Light pours in ; and that though we
blind ones learnedly describe, generalise, and explain
their experience by regular psychological laws which
take account only of psychological organism, still the
light is really there, and the mystic apprehends it
directly, even as he says." 2 St. Theresa would say
" Exactly," and would go on to explain the difference
between real and hysterical auditions and visions.
First, she says the true divine communication
carries its own authority with it, 3 " these words are
operative," or, as she puts it elsewhere, " His words are
1 Rel. Con., p. 66. 8 Ibid., p. 458.
Cp.Marl-: u, 27-33,
3
30 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
deeds." " The second sign is a great calm and a devout
and peaceful recollection . . . together with a desire
to praise God." ..." The third proof is that these
words do not pass from the memory, but remain there
for a very long time. . . . This is not the case with
what men may utter . . . neither if they prophesy of
things to come do we believe them as we do these
divine locutions, which leave us so convinced of their
truth that, although their fulfilment seems utterly
impossible, and we vacillate and doubt about them,
there still remains in the soul a certainty of their
verity which cannot be destroyed . . . and that
finally what was foretold must surely happen ; as
indeed it does." 1 This seems to be an extraordinarily
apt account of the persistence of the Messianic hope
in Israel. " If these locutions," she goes on, " proceed
from the imagination, they show no such signs, bring-
ing neither conviction, peace, nor interior joy with
them." 2
In the Old Testament we have a series of visions and
auditions which answer this test they were believed
and they came to pass. Some were recorded because
they did come to pass, others because of the authority
they carried which made men believe that in spite of
all appearances they would come to" pass. Lady
Julian's division into interior and exterior is simpler
than the more detailed one of St. Theresa, and will be
followed here in examining them, beginning with the
exterior.
These, as St. Theresa says above, may be quite
authentic, but she agrees with the author of the Cloud
of Unknowing that they are generally vouchsafed to
beginners. " All the revelations that ever saw any man
1 Int. Cas., VI, iii, 7-9. 2 Ibid., 16.
FRINGE OF REVELATION 31
here in bodily likeness in this life, they have ghostly
bemeanings. And I trow that if they unto whom they
were shewed had been so ghostly, or could have con-
ceived their bemeanings ghostly, that then they had
never been shewed bodily." 1
In this connection it is interesting that nearly all
the visions and auditions recorded in Genesis seem to
be of this elementary type, or by dream, which latter
mode of communication went out of credit among
the later writing prophets (" I have heard what the
prophets have said that prophecy lies in my name,
saying I have dreamed, I have dreamed. . . . The
prophet that hath a dream let him tell a dream ; and
he that hath my word let him speak my word faith-
fully " 2 ). But both were accepted again in the New
Testament as a means of revelation. St. Matthew
speaks of dreams making known to Joseph and the magi
what they were to do. 3 St. Luke tells of exterior
visions and auditions granted to Zacharias, the Virgin
Mary and the shepherds. 4 These might well all be at
the beginning of such spiritual experiences ; we are
not told that Simeon heard thus : "the Holy Spirit
was upon him." 5
Later Old Testament instances record these exterior
communications as coming to people at the beginning
of a spiritual career or when they were not in the temper
to receive it " ghostly."
To take examples. In Genesis we are told of com-
munications given to Abraham. Certain instances 6 are
definitely exterior. One 7 is spoken of as a vision, in
1 Cloud, p. 258. * Jer. 23, 25-28.
8 Matt, i, 20 ; 2, 12. 13. 19. * Luke 1-2.
B Luke 2, 25-28.
8 Gen. 15, 17; 17, 1-22; 1 8, 1-35; 22, 11-18.
7 Gen. 15, i.
32 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
another " God appeared," 1 and of others 2 we are not
told details.
Hagar 3 and Lot 4 are given exterior visions and
auditions. In Genesis 26, 2. 24 the Lord " appeared
to Isaac." Jacob, in Genesis 28, "dreamed," while
the angels at Mahanaim are apparently an exterior
vision, 6 followed 6 by what appears to be intended to
be the account of another at Jabbok. No manner is
specified in two further instances. 7 Laban also has
a dream. 8
Later on, in Exodus, Moses' vision at the Bush 9 was
apparently an exterior one at the beginning of his
prophetic career. The inauguration of the Covenant
at Sinai before an ignorant people was accompanied by
visible and audible signs. 10 In Numbers 11 there is the
account of an exterior manifestation to a group of which
two at least were not in a state of mind to hear
" ghostly." But what is meant by the Lord speaking
"mouth to mouth even manifestly " to Moses 12 and later
in Deuteronomy 13 by a prophet "whom the Lord knew
face to face " we cannot tell, though it would look as if
the narrators were of opinion that exterior communi-
cations were the highest favour. We are, however,
given no details. Again, Balaam, the semi-accredited
seer, receives communications after three manners. 14
At first, while he is still neutral, after what was ap-
parently his usual fashion, intelligently, at night,
possibly by dream. Later, as he goes wilfully against
1 Gen. 17, i. z Gen. 12, i ; 13, 14; 22, i.
3 Gen. 16, 7 and 21, 17. 4 Gen. 19.
5 Gen. 32, i. 6 Gen. 32, 24-29.
7 Gen. 31, 3 and 35, i. 8 Gen. 31, 24.
9 Exod. 3.
10 Exod. 19, 16-20 ; 24, 10-11 ; cp. Deut. 4, 10-13.
11 Num. 12, 5-9. 12 Num. 12, 8.
13 Dent. 34, 10. 14 Num. 22, 9. 20. 31 ; 23, 16.
FRINGE OF REVELATION 33
his better judgment, by exterior vision. Then, when he
persisted, the matter was taken out of his power
altogether and the word was " put in his mouth."
Moses' visions in Exodus 33, 17-23 ; 34, 6 will be dis-
cussed elsewhere, but it is noteworthy that in an
account which purports to be of the beginnings of
religious experience and direct revelation the pheno-
mena recorded should be of revelation by modes which
later experience has shown to be appropriate to that
stage of spiritual development. It is especially notable,
if it be true that the records were finally edited at a
date when the more interior form of revelation appears
to have been in use.
These exterior revelations are elsewhere generally
recorded at the beginning of a spiritual career, Gideon's
conversation with the angel of the Lord at Ophrah
was as exterior as the manifestations in Genesis 3 it
was not till the end of the interview that the angel was
recognised. Manoah's wife took the angel for a man
of God; 2 Joshua, for an unknown warrior. 3 Samuel
was called by an exterior audition ; 4 in 2 Samuel
24, 17 and i Chronicles 21, 16. 20, 21 the same word
is used for seeing David and seeing the angel. The
visions in Ezekiel I, 4 and 3, 22 were apparently
exterior. Then in the New Testament, when prophecy
had long been silent, Saul was called by an exterior
audition, 5 as was also Cornelius. 6 Perhaps the deliver-
ances in Acts 5, 19 and 12, 7-12 hardly come under
the same category, nor the vision on the Mount of
Transfiguration. The accounts of the latter in Matthew
and Mark speak of it as if it were an exterior vision,
but Luke has the interesting addition, 7 " Now Peter
1 Judges 6, 11-23. z Judges 13. 3 Josh. 5, 13-15-
4 i Sam. 3, 4-21. * Acts 9, 7 ; 26, 13. 14. Acts 10, 3.
7 Luke 9, 32.
34 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
and they that were with him were heavy with sleep ;
but when they were fully awake they beheld His glory
and the two men that stood with him," which recalls
Zechariah 4, 1, " And the angel that talked with me
came again and waked me, as a man that is wakened
out of his sleep," and then showed him a vision. It also
resembles two passages in Daniel, 1 all of which seem to
imply some more interior mode of sight. Whatever the
date of Daniel it contains one or two allusions to modes
of audition that can be illustrated from other sources.
Another case in which we find exterior communica-
tions in use is when the state of mind of the hearer is
such that he cannot hear or see otherwise, as it was
with Elijah at Sinai. 2
The question is, what do these people mean when
they say they ' ' heard " or " saw ' ' ? We are apparently
meant to take it quite literally that they did hear and
see things from another order of being. Samuel heard
a voice speaking so clearly that he thought it was Eli
calling. 8 Elijah at Sinai heard the still small voice
after the same manner that he heard the , storm.*
There are many instances of messages sent by the
prophets between these two instances, but no descrip-
tion of the mode is given . It seems that Elisha's power
of seeing spiritual things was tested at Elijah's trans-
lation, and that he really did see an exterior vision. 8
Exterior vision and audition together are implied for
Moses at the Bush, 6 and for Ezekiel, at all events, in his
first experiences ; 7 Saul implies them in Acts ; 8 in both
accounts it is mentioned that his companions heard
and saw something but were not able to receive it, a
1 Dan. 8, 18 and 10, 9. 10. 3 i Kings 19, 5-18.
3 i Sam. 3, 4-14. * I Kings 19, 11-13.
5 2 Kings 2, ii. 6 Exod. 3, 1-5.
7 Ezek. i, 4-28 ; 3, 22. 24. 8 Acts 9, 3-7 and 22, 9.
FRINGE OF REVELATION 35
point illustrated by the differing apprehension of the
" voice " in St. John 12, 29. The visions seen by
Zacharias, the Virgin Mary and Cornelius were all
apparently exterior, and St. Luke carefully distinguishes
in Acts 10 between the vision of Cornelius which was
seen " openly " and that of Peter which was seen in
" a trance," and he is careful to tell us that Peter in
prison 1 had an objective experience, but thought he
saw a vision.
Those who give us these accounts were sure that there
was something to be seen if a man had eyes to see and
that certain men had their eyes open to these things
and did see them. There is an interesting series of
instances in an ascending scale dealing with the idea
of the eyes being opened to see what is actually there.
First, Hagar's are opened to a material object. " God
opened her eyes and she saw a well of water " 2 ; then
Balaam's to a spiritual one. " The Lord opened the
eyes of Balaam and he saw the angel." 3 Then there is
the story of Elisha and the Syrians in which we have
not only the opening of the eyes of Elisha 's servant
to see the angel guard, but the closing of the eyes of
the Syrians, that they might recognise neither Elisha
nor the city of Samaria until their eyes were opened
again ; that, rather than a complete blindness, would
seem to be implied by the story. 4 The same thing is
suggested in the story of the two disciples going to
Emmaus. "Their eyes were holden that they should
not know Him." Then at the breaking of the bread
" their eyes were opened and they knew Him, and He
vanished out of their sight." 5
These instances are practically all those in the Bible
1 Acts 12, 9. * Gen,, 21, 19. 3 Num. 22, 31.
4 2 Kings 6, 8-23. 6 Luke 24, 16. 31.
36 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
of which we can definitely say that the narrators
plainly intend us to understand that something was
seen or heard with the outward eye or ear. There are,
however, many more modern instances, a few of which
may be quoted as bearing out the principles that have
been suggested.
Did St, Augustine actually hear a child playing, or
was it a spiritual voice which he heard that brought
about his conversion ? If it were an audition it was
certainly an exterior one. His account leaves the ques-
tion open. " Lo, from a neighbouring house I heard a
voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not, singing and oft
repeating, ' Take, read. Take, read.' Instantly, with
a changed countenance, I began to think most intently,
whether boys in any kind of game used to sing such a
phrase ; nor could I remember ever to have heard the
like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose ;
interpreting it to be no other than a Divine command to
open the book, and read the first chapter I should find." 1
St. Augustine, like St. Paul, had been living under
great nervous strain for some time before his call, and
this very definite call seems to have been necessary to
help them to overcome the inhibitions, moral and in-
tellectual, which stood in the way of their change of
mind.
Suso tells of a somewhat different instance. " A
secular man from a foreign country " sought him, say-
ing that a little while ago he had been in despair and
on the point of suicide. " I had already taken a run
with the deliberate purpose of drowning myself. I
heard a voice above me say, ' Stop ! stop ! Put not
thyself to this shameful death ; seek a friar preacher,'
and the voice named you to me by name which I had
1 Confessions, viii, 12.
FRINGE OF REVELATION 37
never heard before, and it said, ' He will help you and
set you right ! ' " which he did. 1 Suso gives several
other instances of much the same kind. This is one of
the most definite for our purpose.
Bunyan was much troubled with auditions, both in-
terior and exterior, both those which he says were
heavenly and those which were of diabolical origin. It
is not always clear from his account how they were
heard. Once he said he was warned by the text,
" Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you."
Then he heard a voice calling behind him, " Simon,
Simon ! " The last time it called him " I turned my
head over my shoulder thinking verily that some man
had behind me called me ; being at a great distance,
methought he called so loud," 2 but most of his experi-
ences seem to belong rather to the second category of
communication.
Coming nearer to our own day, there are several
interesting examples in Hudson Taylor in Early Years,
the founder of the China Inland Mission.
The first is one told in 1844 by a speaker at a camp
meeting. It had happened to a man the speaker had
known in Tasmania, of the name of Gardener. " Walk-
ing up Cataract Hill . . .he had even been startled
by a voice behind him earnestly saying : ' Gardener,
give Me thy heart.' He turned to face the speaker, but
no one was in sight." He heard it again : " My son,
give Me thy heart." But it would have upset his plans
to become a Christian just then, so he put by the call.
Shortly afterwards, being violently tempted to kill his
partner for a sum of money he possessed, he was
unable to resist, and presently murdered him. He told
the story to the chaplain the night before his execution. 3
1 Suso, chap. 61. 2 Grace Abounding, 93. 3 H.T., pp. 60-62.
38 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Another instance tells of a Chinese farmer who lay
sick at home, and in terror of death. "And then a
strange thing happened. In the silence of the empty
house he heard himself called. The voice, though un-
known, was so real that he got up and made his way
to the door, but on opening it could see no one. Pain-
fully he crept back to bed, only to hear the same voice
a little later calling more urgently. Again he rose, and,
supporting himself by the walls and furniture, managed
to reach the door. But again no one was in sight.
Greatly alarmed, he buried his face beneath the cover-
let. . . . And now the voice spoke a third time, and
told him not to be afraid. He was going, it said, to
recover. An infusion of a certain herb would cure his
sickness, and as soon as he was able he was to go into
Ning-po, where he would hear of a new religion that
would bring him peace of heart." He did as he was
bidden, worked his way to Ning-po, and there met a
former neighbour who brought him to Christ and he
became one of the most useful of the missionaries'
native helpers. 1
Two other visions granted to people at the beginning
of a career of Christian work, both of which were
apparently exterior, were the visions of Christ seen
by Catherine of Genoa, and by Finney, two very
different people, neither of whom had visions sub-
sequently. The vision seen by Sundar Singh on the
night of his conversion, also apparently exterior, will
be treated of in the next chapter.
It will have been noticed that these exterior com-
munications of which examples have been given, were
made when there was no human means of reaching
the person dealt with, either because of his mental
i H.T., p. 474.
FRINGE OF REVELATION 39
state or his isolation. The following account from
A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China illustrates this
point still further. Mr. Glover, his wife, their two
children, and Miss Gates, a lady missionary, were
fleeing for their lives from the Boxers. They had taken
refuge in a little hollow .on the top of a hill, where,
exposed to the full glare of the sun, they waited through-
out- the scorching day, hoping that their faithful
Chinese servant would be able to bring them some
help. It was a time of thirst and intense strain. The
two women were in a state of collapse, and yet they
dared not come out of their place of hiding to go down
to the stream below and drink, for fear of being mur-
dered. Then, " As my dear wife and I were pleading
with God for her [Miss Gates's] recovery, I heard a
word behind me, as distinctly as if it were spoken in
my ear ' Up, get thee down and tarry not.' I said
to my wife, ' Come, darling, we must gather up what
strength remains to us and go down to the water. It
is not the will of God that we should remain here any
longer.' Then, taking Miss Gates by the arm, I bent
over her and said, ' Dear sister, we must be going
without delay. In the name of the Lord Jesus, get
up ! ' In a moment consciousness was restored, and
she rose up." They went down, drank, and had
hardly taken shelter under some trees when a small
party of yamen officials with a cart appeared, who
took charge of them, and they were saved for at all
events the next stage of their journey. " Twenty
minutes later and we should have been too late ! The
procession would have gone on and the cart with it,
and we should have been left to the rabble. Then
it was that I understood the urgency of that Voice . . .
and how truly it had been the Voice of God. Then,
D
40 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
too, it was that I realised how the strength to rise
up and get down was given where, humanly speaking,
it was an impossibility. ' ' 1
One more instance Dorothy Kerin, writing of her
experience of divine healing in 1912. She received
Holy Communion when it was thought that she was
past hope of recovery, and " In the evening I asked
my little sister to sing 'Abide with me,' as all was
then so dark. She did not know it well enough to sing,
but as she sat by my bed with my hand in hers, we
heard it sung from beginning to end most beautifully.
My sister heard it as distinctly as I did, and said ' Oh,
how wonderful ! ' We are certain it must have been
the holy angels who sang it, for there was no one
singing either in the house or outside." Then she
had what was apparently an interior vision of our
Lord, after which "a great light came all round
me, and an Angel took my hands in his and said,
' Dorothy, your sufferings are over. Get up and walk.'
He passed his hands over my eyes and touched my
ears, and then I opened my eyes and found myself
sitting up in bed.". . . She said she must get up.
" The Angel said to me again, ' Get up and walk.'
Then they brought the dressing-gown, and when I
had put it on I got out of bed unassisted. Part of the
light came to the right side of the bed, and I put my
hand on it and it led me out of the room and along a
passage and then back into my room again." 2
As was said above, nearly all these cases of exterior
vision and audition came at the beginning of a spiritual
experience or when the person concerned was not in
a state of mind to hear an interior voice. The same
1 1000 Miles, pp. 172, 178.
8 The Living Touch, pp. 7-10.
FRINGE OF REVELATION 41
was the case with two instances which were told me
personally. A Chinese missionary told me how he had
been attacked while itinerating, and fled from the
inn in which he had been resting, leaving his books,
etc., behind. Then he heard a voice saying, perfectly
audibly, " Be not afraid of their terror," and, said he,
" The fear went," and he went back and secured his
books unmolested. Another time during the war a
young fellow's mother told, in the presence of her son,
that While he was taking a message at the Front, he
had stopped, hearing his name called. On looking
round there was no one, but a shell had fallen just
where he would have been if he had gone on. I was
told that the same thing happened to many others.
The same year (1915) when I visited an old woman
in my neighbourhood, she told how some fifteen years
before she had been lying alone ill, when she saw our
Lord stand by her and heard Him say, " Be not afraid.
It is I." The memory was, she said, still vivid. She
was said to be a " reformed character," but whether
the reformation dated from that experience I did not
hear. The parish priest said that he had heard many
similar stories from uneducated people, and seemed to
think they signified very little.
There is one interesting exception to the general
principle of the use of exterior manifestations noted
above. Catherine of Siena told Fr. Raymund of
Capua, her confessor and one of her biographers, " I
was never taught the rule of spiritual life by any man
or woman, but only by my Lord and Master Jesus
Christ, Who made it known to me either by secret
inspiration or else appearing openly to me and speaking
to me as I now speak to you." She declared also that
in the beginning her visions were for the most part
42 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
only wrought in the imagination, but they were after-
wards sensible, so that she saw with her eyes the Form
that appeared to her, and heard with her ears the
sound of the voice that spoke. 1 But later we are told
with many examples "that she saw more distinctly
the souls than the bodies of those who approached
her," 2 so that her whole hearing and seeing may have
been abnormal.
She gives, however, practically the same criterion
whereby to judge the validity of visions as does Theresa.
Our Lord said to her : "By this thou mayest know
if thy vision be from Me or from the enemy ; of Truth
or of falsehood ; if they come of Truth they will make
thy soul humble, if they come of falsehood they will
make thee proud." 3
All these more modern instances just given have
been purposeful, and except in one case they have been
effective in what they were meant to do. There is
also enough likeness between the conditions in which
they are used for us to say that the instances recorded
of exterior vision and audition in the Old Testament
seem to have been of a similar nature, and that man
has been so planned that in case of need God can use
the eyes and ears He has made to convey intimations
from Himself at times when other methods are not
available. It were indeed a strange architect who
should plan a temple to which all should be admitted
except himself.
1 C. of S., p. 40. 2 Ibid., p. 87. 3 Ibid., p. 42.
CHAPTER V
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE
SO far we have only touched the fringe of the pro-
phetic office, dealing with experiences common to
people at many stages of the spiritual life, but chiefly
in its more elementary development, and liable to be
counterfeited, either by auto- or hetero-suggestion, yet
which do appear sometimes to be made the means
of conveying genuine divine communications.
But we are warned that this hearing and carrying
of divine messages is only a very small part of the
prophetic life. It is indeed the work to which a prophet
is called, but the discharge of his office requires the
background of a life lived before God ("The LORD
before whom I stand," 1 ), a life of steady discipline and
obedience. The literary output of the prophets which
has come down to us is astonishingly small. A popular
preacher of the present day will print more matter in
a year than an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, or an Ezekiel has
left of half a century's ministry. Very probably the
greater part of their preaching has not come down to
us, but even so we find long periods of retirement
in their lives when they did not exercise their ministry.
Clearly it was required of a prophet not only that he
should be a man who was sufficiently " sensitive "
or " psychic " to be able to hear a message, but that he
1 i Kings 17, i ; cp. 2 Kings 5, 25 and i Kings 10, 8.
43
44 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
should be able to hold his tongue when he had no
message to give, and to live the disciplined life which
was the condition of vision.
Such a man being found, he was called to the work.
We are not always given details 1 of the mode of the
call, but in certain instances at least we are told that
it was accompanied by something in the nature of a
vision of God which was on a few occasions exterior,
and the later visions are fuller than the earlier ones.
Considering the position given to Moses in the national
history as theman who spoke to God face to face and was
made the mediator of that covenant relationship which
was held to be the raison d'etre of Israel's existence,
it is remarkable that the account of visions granted
to him is much simpler than that of visions seen by
Isaiah and Ezekiel. Moses' call was by the voice from
the Burning Bush. 1 Later, at Sinai, it was impossible
for him to see the full vision of the Lord. 2 This record
of the limitation of the great leader's vision seems to
point to the preservation of some genuine tradition.
We are, it seems, meant to understand an objective
vision in both cases. The next call recorded is that of
the nation at Sinai. 3 There the vision is only of the
thick, fiery cloud and the terrible words, a manifestation
of a character .which as was seen in the last chapter
it was possible for people at a low stage of spiritual
development to receive. But in view of that and
of the definite limitation of the vision of Moses, it is
difficult to account for the description of the covenant
feast of the elders, when " they beheld God, and did
eat and drink." 4
The call of Samuel again was by exterior audition, 5
1 Exod. 3, 2-4. 2 Exod. 33, 17-23.
3 Exod. 19 and 20. 4 Exod. 24, 9-11.
D i Sam. 3, 1-14.
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 45
and we have no further full record of a prophetic call
until Isaiah's except that Amos says, " The LORD took
me from following the flock." 1
With Isaiah we come to a far more detailed vision.
" I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted
up, and His train filled the temple." 2 He saw also the
heavenly court and heard the word of the Lord giving
him his commission.
Ezekiel by the river Chebar apparently received his
call through an ob j ecti ve vision . It has been suggested
that there is a certain solar phenomenon sometimes
visible in Mesopotamia which may have furnished the
starting-point of his vision of the heavenly chariot,
but, in addition, he sees " the likeness of a throne, as
the appearance of a sapphire stone (in Exodus 24, the
pavement was of sapphire), and upon the likeness
of the throne was a likeness as the appearance of a man
upon it above," all shot through with the appearance
of fiery glory. 3
From Jeremiah I, 9 we conclude that the call of the
prophet was accompanied by a vision, but he gives no
details.
The call of the apostles by our Lord during His
incarnate life does not come into the question under
discussion. But the call of Saul 4 was, as pointed out
before, apparently an objective vision.
Elijah's recornmissioning at Sinai 5 was accompanied
by an exterior audition, and the commission of the
seer of Patmos for his special work was by the vision
of the Lord, not apparently objective, but given when
he was " in the spirit."
So we are told that some at least of the men who
1 Amos 7, 15. 2 Isa. 6.
3 Ezek. i, 26-28. 4 Acts 9, 7 ; i Cor. 15, 8.
6 i Kings 19, 9-18.
46 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
were called to a special life of witness were given their
commission in a personal vision or audition by God
Himself. Sometimes, as in the case of Ezekiel, the
vision recurs, sometimes it seems to be unique in that
particular form.
Other saints have left records of a similar call
by which their life work was practically fixed, and all
bear out the observation of Prof. James, 1 that " there
is one form of sensory automatism which possibly
deserves special notice on account of its frequency. I
refer to hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory luminous
phenomena, photisms, to use the term of the psycholo-
gists. St. Paul's blinding heavenly vision seems to
have been a phenomenon of this sort ; so does Con-
stantine's cross in the sky. Henry Alline mentions
a light about whose externality he seems uncertain.
Col. Gardiner sees a blazing light." He might have
added St. Theresa's statement that " the splendour of
Him who is revealed in the vision resembles an infused
light, as of the sun, covered with a veil as transparent
as a diamond, if such a texture could be woven." 2 What
is this but the externalising of what St. John says :
" God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all," 3
and Christ's words : " I am the light of the world." 4
That is as it may be, but in most of the instances we
have quoted from the Bible the vision was accompanied
by fiery light, and the same account is generally given
in the latter manifestations which will now be brought
forward.
First, the vision of Catherine of Siena by which her
vocation was fixed. Catherine's legend is so full of
the marvellous that it is somewhat risky to quote,
1 Var. of Rel. Exp., p. 252. 2 Int. Cas., VI, ix. 3.
3 i John 1,5. 4 John 8, 12.
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 47
and, consequently, some cautious biographers omit the
greater part of that side of it. But it seems to be
certain ihat when she was six she saw the vision which
fixed her vocation. One account of it is as follows :
She was going on an errand with her brother " when,
raising her head and looking towards the Church of
San Domenico on the opposite hill, Catherine saw in
the heavens a majestic throne set, as it were, upon the
gable-end of the church, on which throne appeared our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, crowned with a tiara,
and wearing pontifical robes, while beside Him stood "
various saints. As she stood looking " she beheld how
our Lord stretched out His right hand towards her,
and made over her the sign of the cross." -She stood
absorbed until her brother came and took her by the
hand to lead her home and roused her " as it were out of
a deep sleep," and from that time she was no more a
child. 1 The vision changed her from being a good
little girl into a person with a definite aim in life, to be
conformed to the Lord she had seen.
A different experience was that of Stephen Grellet
about 1798. He had been converted for some years,
and had been recognised among the Friends as a
preacher, when, during an epidemic of yellow fever, he
was so near to death that his coffin was ordered. But
" whilst death seemed to be approaching, and I turned
myself on one side, the more easily to breathe my last,
my spirit, feeling already as encircled by the angelic
host in the Heavenly Presence, a secret but powerful
language was proclaimed on this wise : ' Thou shalt
not die, but live thy work is not yet done.' Then
the comers of the earth, over seas and lands, were
opened to me, where I should have to labour in the
1 C- of S., pp. 13-14-
48 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
service of the gospel of Christ. Oh, what amazement
I was filled with ! What a solemn and awful prospect
was set before me ! Sorrow took hold of me at the
words : for it seemed as if I had had already a foothold
in the heavenly places. I wept sore, but as it was the
Divine will I bowed in reverence before Him." 1 He
recovered, and said nothing to anyone, but in a
meeting not long after " Arthur Ho well, in the course
of his testimony mentioned me by name, and said that
the Lord had raised me up, having a service for me
in the isles and nations afar off, to the east and west,
the north and south." 2 In later years he travelled
throughout New England and Europe preaching,
with very remarkable results.
Another noted missioner Charles Finney was also-
called by a vision which has several points in common
with that of Isaiah,
It was about 1821, and Finney was a young man in a
lawyer's office. He had had few religious privileges,
but found many allusions to Biblical principles in some
of the old legal authorities. This excited his curiosity,
and he began to read the Bible, but found little help in
the teachings of the local ministry. One day he gave
himself entirely to Christ. That evening, wanting to
be alone, he went into the room behind the front office
to pray.
" There was no fire and no light in the room ;
nevertheless it appeared as if it were perfectly light.
As I went in and shut the door it seemed as if I met the
Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It did not occur to me
that it was wholly a mental state ; it seemed that I
saw Him as I would see any other man. He said
nothing, but looked at me in such a manner as to break
1 Grellst, pp. 41-42. 2 Ibid., p. 43.
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 49
me right down at his f eet . I have always since regarded
this as a most remarkable state of mind, for it seemed
that He stood before me, and I fell down at His feet, and
poured out my soul to Him." 1
Yet another example of the call to an apostolic
career by a vision is that of Sundar Singh. In great
spiritual distress he had determined that if he gained
no satisfaction for his soul by five in the morning he
would kill himself. "At 4.30 I saw something of
which I had no idea at all previously. In the room
where I was praying I saw a great light. I thought the
place was on fire. I looked round but could find
nothing. . . . Then, as I prayed and looked into the
light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had
such an appearance of glory and love. ... I heard
a voice saying, in Hindustani, ' How long will you
persecute Me ? I have come to save you ; you were
praying to know the right way. Why do you not take
it ? ' The thought then came to me, ' Jesus Christ is
not dead, but living, and it must be He Himself.' So
I fell at His feet and got this wonderful Peace which I
could not get anywhere else." 2
Later he undertook a forty days' fast, which he
regards as a definite step in his spiritual life. " In
the course of the fast he saw Christ ; not, he says, as at
his conversion, with his physical eyes, because they
were now dim and could not see anything, but in a
spiritual vision, with pierced hands, bleeding feet, and
radiant face." 3
These visions, both those recorded in the Bible and
those of later date, were very effectual as a preparation
for the work to which they called the seers, unifying
1 Finney, p. 17. 2 The Sadhu, p. 6.
8 The Sadhu, p. 25.
50 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
their wills for the life of discipline and danger to which
they were now committed.
It was a life of discipline and purging of desires, as we
have already seen, for, as the prophets of old declared,
self-seeking and self-indulgence blinded the eyes.
Seeking to please men, says Ezekiel, is another cause
of false prophecy, and Zephaniah was not the last who
saw the best spiritual hopes for his people in poverty. 1
John Woolman tells how in 1764 an old Friend stood
up in the yearly meeting and said that " he had been a
member of our Society for upwards of sixty years, and
he well remembered that in those early times Friends
were a plain, lowly-minded people, and that there was
much tenderness and contrition in their meetings.
That at twenty years from that time, the Society
increasing in wealth and in some degree conforming to
the fashions of the world, true humility was less
apparent, and their meetings in general were not so
lively and edifying. That at the end of forty years
many of them were grown very rich, and many of the
Society made a specious appearance in the world. . , .
And as such things became more prevalent, so
the powerful overshadowings of the Holy Ghost
were less manifest in the Society." 2 On his arrival
in England Woolman bears a witness which would
have satisfied Zephaniah upon the way in which
Friends had mixed themselves with trafficking.
" Members of our Society worked in superfluities, and
bought and sold them, and thus dimness of sight
overcame many." 3 The prophet might have only
one love, and in obedience to it he might not indulge in
fear. He must go where he was sent. The whole
1 Zeph. i, 17-18; 3, 11-13. 2 Woolman, pp. 187-8.
3 Ibid., p. 237.
THE CALL. TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 51
interview in Exod. 3 and 4 is punctuated by Moses'
attempts to have himself excused from the work to
which he was called, but nevertheless he was held to it
relentlessly. Jeremiah's ministry begins in much the
same way. "Then said I, ' Ah, Lord GOD ! behold I
cannot speak, for I am a child.' But the LORD said unto
me, ' Say not I am a child ; for to whomsoever I shall
send thee thou shalt go, and whatsoever I shall
command thee thou shalt speak.' ' (1 And all through
his ministry we see in Jeremiah a shrinking from the
heavy task which he was made to carry through. A
like charge is.given to Ezekiel. " And thou son of man
be not afraid of them, neither be afraid of their words,
though briars and thorns be with thee, and thou dost
dwell among scorpions, be not afraid of their words, nor
be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious
house. And thou shalt speak My words unto them,
whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear." 2
We may believe that nothing less than the vision of
the Most High could have nerved the prophet for such
a task as that to which he was committed, for he was
opposed not only to the social habits of his people, but
to their most distinguished popular preachers and
teachers.
The very scantiness of their records is one sign of
the honesty and self-control of the true prophets. We
have not many details of the methods of the false
prophets, but one characteristic seems to be implied.
They were generally ready to give an " oracle " at short
notice, and to speak freely upon any occasion. The
true prophet waited for his message, even though he
was practically sure what it would be ; as Jeremiah,
openly contradicted by Hananiah, gave no counter
1 Jer. i, 6-7. a Ezek. 2, 6-7; 3, 8-n.
52 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
oracle, but " went his way " until he was sent back
with a definite " word of the LORD." Again, after, the
destruction of Jerusalem, when Johanan and the others
came to him to ask advice, he waited ten days for a
sure word, though when it came it was what he had
been saying all the time. 1 In this we are reminded of
Christ's repeated saying in St. John's Gospel, " Mine
hour is not yet come." 2 God, to whom all hearts are
open, knows the exact moment at which His words
must be spoken to have the effect He intends to
produce.
Something of this obedience of the prophet is to be
found in John Woolman ; we see in him that same
feeling of responsibility for the message given to him
which makes St. Paul so careful in his epistles to
distinguish between what " I say of myself," and what
is given him by the Spirit. 3 It is impossible with our
lack of data to speak too positively about pre-Christian
conditions, but such records as we have of Christian
men and women who lived in close touch with Him who
is the Truth go to show that it bred in them a great
conscientiousness which finds a very clear expression
in John Woolman.
He writes : " One day, being under a strong exercise of
the spirit, I stood up and said some words in a meeting ;
but not keeping close to the Divine opening, I said,
more than was required of me. Being soon sensible of
my error, I was afflicted in mind some weeks, without
any light or comfort, even to that degree that I could
not take pleasure in anything . . . being thus
humbled and disciplined under the cross, my under-
standing became more strengthened to distinguish
the pure spirit which inwardly moves on the heart, and
1 Jer. 28 and 42. 2 John 2, 4 ; 7, 6-8. 3 i Cor. 7, lo. 12, etc.
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 53
which taught me to wait in silence sometimes many
weeks together, until I felt that rise which prepares the
creature to stand like a trumpet through which the Lord
speaks to His flock. ... I was taught to watch the
pure opening, and to take heed lest, while I was
standing to speak, my own will should get uppermost,
and cause me to utter words from worldly wisdom, and
depart from the channel of the true gospel ministry."
Some little time later he went on a mission tour with
a friend who was "frequently strengthened to
publish the word of life amongst them. As for me, I
was often silent through the meetings, and when I spoke
it was with much care, that I might speak only what
truth opened." 1 This has a suggestion of St. Paul's
caution to the Corinthians that "the spirits of the
prophets are subject to the prophets," 2 and are not to
be allowed to run away with them.
It was as important that the prophet . should not
speak when he had no message as that he should speak
when he had ; that he should learn to be silent. So
we find Isaiah told to bind up the testimony and wait, 3
and Ezekiel's grim, mysterious silences inhibitions,
we might call them now were to be as much a sign
as his speech. 4 Woolman again speaks of his care
" from day to day to say neither more nor less than
what the spirit of truth opened in me, being jealous
over myself lest I should say anything to make my
testimony look agreeable to that mind in people which
is not in pure obedience to the cross of Christ." 5 And
so, say the letters written after his death, Woolman 's
ministry " was very sound, deep and penetrating. . . .
1 Woolman, pp. 50-51, 56. 2 i Cor. 14, 32.
3 Isa. 8, 16-17.
4 Ezek. 3, 26-27 J 24, 27 ; 29, 21 ; 33, 21-22.
6 Woolman, p. 140 ; cp. Ezek. 13, 6. 16.
54 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
In transacting the affairs of the discipline his judgment
was sound and clear." 1 Thus, though his conscientious-
ness may now and then appear hypersensitive, it is
evident that it made him a man who could be trusted
with a direct message, which was one of the functions
of the prophet. Many of his scruples are of the kind
which St. Paul cast to the winds (notably that which
made him only write short letters, for fear lest the
post-horses should be overburdened), but where
Woolman's inspiration was a streamlet whose course
had to be kept clear, St. Paul's was a torrent which
carved out a course for itself, and gave little chance
for weeds to grow up and divert it .
Closely allied to this care in speaking was the
obligation to speak when the word was given. The
prophet might have to be silent when what looked like
a good opportunity arose, he had also to speak when
he might wish to be silent.
We have spoken before of the conception of the
prophet as a watchman responsible to those in the
town below, 2 but beside this there is the power of
the word in his heart insisting on being spoken. "HI
say I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more
in his name, then there is in mine heart as it were a
burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with
forbearing, and I cannot contain," 3 and so it goes on,
from "The Lord God hath spoken, who can but
prophesy" 4 to "Necessity is laid upon me; for woe
is me if I preach not the gospel." 5
The prophetic message may be pain and grief to see
and to speak. 6 The prophecy of Jeremiah, like that
1 Woolman, p. 261. 2 Ezek. 3, 16-21 ; 33, 1-9,
3 Jer. 20, 9. * Amos 3, 8. B i Cor. 9, 16,
Isa. 16, 9-n ; 21, 1-4; 22, 4-5; Jer. 4, 19-22; 15, 15-18;
Ps. 39, 2.
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 55
of Hosea, is broken with sobs, but the prophet might
not be wise for himself, his knowledge was given to be
passed on.
The same description of the fiery compulsion is
found in other seers. Behmen says : " With the eyes
of my spirit I saw God. I saw both what God is, and
how God is what He is. And with that came an un-
controllable impulse to put it down, so as to preserve
what I had seen ... the truth of God did burn in
my bones till I took pen and ink and began to set it
down." He continues, that when the Spirit was taken
away he could not always understand what he had
written, and prayed that the matters should be given
to a more learned man. " But He always put my
prayer away from Him and continued to kindle His
fire in my bones." 1
Fox in 1651 felt himself commanded to go to
Lichfield. 2 He got within a mile. "Then I was
commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood
still, for it was winter ; and the word of the Lord was
like a fire in me. So I put off my shoes and left them
with the shepherds. . . . Then I walked on about a
mile, and as soon as I was within the city, the word of
the Lord came to me again, saying ' Cry, Woe to the
bloody city of Lichfield,' " and as he went he saw the
city full of blood. John Woolman uses a different
metaphor. " My heart was like a vessel that wanted
vent. For several weeks after my arrival, when my
mouth was opened in meetings, it was like the raising
of a gate in a water-course when a weight of water lay
upon it." 3
The testimony of Sarah Grubb (1773-1842) .gives
1 Quoted R. E. Welsh, " Classics of the Soul's Quest," p. 206.
2 Fox, p. 57. 3 Woolman, p. 245.
E
56 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
another illustration : l " . . . Often have I hesitated
and felt such a reluctance to it, that I have suffered
the meeting to break up without having made the
sacrifice ; yea, when the word of life in a few words was
like a fire within me. . . .No one knows the depth of
my sufferings and the mortifying, yea, crucifying of my
own will, which I had to endure in this service ; yet I
have to acknowledge to the sufficiency of Divine grace
therein. ... At Bath I had to go to the Pump Room
and declare the truth to the gay people who resorted
there. . . . In these days and years of my life I was
seldom from under some heavy burden, so that I went
greatly bowed down."
It would indeed appear that this feeling of com-
pulsion is part of the meaning of the word translated
"burden " or "oracle " which occurs in many prophecies
of Isaiah 2 and others, until in the time of Jeremiah it
had become so cheapened somewhat as the expression
" message " is now in certain quarters that reputable
prophets gave up its use. 3 Ezeldel seems to substitute
" the hand of the Lord was upon me," or " was heavy
upon me." 4 The meaning in both cases seeming to be
a heavy, directing constraint, a " concern," a feeling
of " must,"
Fox tells how in the latter part of 1670, after he had
been taking meetings in Kent, 5 " We passed towards
Rochester. On the way, as I was walking down a hill,
a great weight and oppression fell upon my spirit ; I
got on my horse again, but the weight remained so that
I was hardly able to ride. At length we came to
Rochester, but I was much spent, being so extremely
1 C. L. F. T., pp. 50, 51. a Isa. 13-23, etc.
8 Jer. 23, 33.
* Ezek. 3, 14.22 ; 8, i ; 37, I ; 40, i.
6 Fox, p. 418-21.
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 57
laden and burthened with the world's spirits that my
life was oppressed under them. ..." At the house of
various friends he "lay all that winter, warring in
spirit with the evil spirits of the world that warred
against truth and Friends," and for the greater part of
the time a violent persecution of the Friends was in
progress. Towards the spring it died down, " and I
plainly felt, and those Friends that were with me, and
that came to visit me, took notice that as the persecu-
tion ceased, I came from under the travails and
sufferings that had lain with such weight upon me."
In 1688 he again writes :* " About this time great
exercise and weights came upon me (as had usually
done before the great revolutions and changes of
government) and my strength departed from me, so
that I reeled and was ready to fall as I went along
the streets."
Stephen Grellet felt something of this when he came
to London in 1811. " I soon felt the heavy gospel
bonds awaiting me in this metropolis to be rapidly
fastening upon me. The depth of exercise into which
I was introduced on account of the various classes of
its inhabitants is indescribable. Rich and poor . . . .
rested heavily upon me." 2 In 1819 he went to Rome,
and writes : " My bonds for Rome also feel so heavy
that I could not have any pleasure in those things
which, were I differently circumstanced, would interest
me so much." 3
Woolman's Journal is full of such experiences.
" Having sat a while silent, I felt a weight on my mind,
and stood up ; and through the gracious regard of our
Heavenly Father strength was given fully to clear
myself of a burden which for some days had been
1 Fox, p. 488. 2 Grellet, p. 74. 3 Ibid., p. 162.
58 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
increasing upon me." 1 The whole question of slavery
was very much upon his mind, and we frequently meet
such words as " I felt an engagement on my mind to
have a conference with them in private concerning
their slaves." 2 "... There yet remained on my
mind a secret though heavy exercise in regard to some
leading active members about ^Newport, who were in
the practice of keeping slaves." 3 " To speak of that
which is the burden of the Word in an easy way to the
natural part, doth not reach the bottom of the
disorder." 4 "Fifth of fifth month, 1768 I left home
under the humbling hand of the Lord, with a certificate
to visit some meetings in Maryland." 5
There is, of course, always the possibility that men
so deeply read in their Bibles as these were, suggested
to themselves similar experiences to those of which they
read, but it seems more probable that in men living in
a like relation to God the same Spirit wrought similar
experiences. This seems the more probable as we gain
our .interpretation of what may have been the ex-
perience of the prophet, from the description given by
the later writer. These men were in their measure
used to do great works for God. They were not fanciful
fanatics. Grellet and Woolman were both good men
of business ; Finney was a lawyer, Fox a great
organiser, and founder of a Society noted for the
excellent business capacities of its members. The
practical effect of the spiritual experiences of these men
gives us the right to believe them genuine men do not
gather figs of thorns and makes it not unreasonable
to believe that those of the prophets were also genuine,
and thus enables us to go on with tolerable confidence
1 Woolman, p. 77. 2 Ibid., p. 143. z Ibid., p. 148.
4 Ibid., p. 150. B Ibid., p. 200.
THE CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 59
to study the other indications of the manner in which
they received the messages and " burdens" for which
they had been so carefully prepared, and to the
proclamation of which they were so insistently
driven.
CHAPTER VI
THE PROPHETIC VISION
" Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint :
But he that keepeth the law, happy is he." 1
THE vision and the law are placed in parallelism.
The wise man taught that the moral standard of
his people, the standard upon which our own has been
built up, was not evolved by man's intelligence, but by
the vision of the prophet. To the more particular
consideration of that vision we now come.
The prophets themselves give very few details of the
manner by which they received their communications.
Their spiritual processes had not been dissected into
the " stick-and-label " state to which we with our
modern psychological notions would like to reduce them;
nor had they a language suitable for the expression of
the subtle distinctions which even St. Theresa candidly
says she could never quite understand, even when they
had been explained to her. They were content to accept
and act upon the message which was the outcome of the
experience.
It will, therefore, be easier, as labels have their uses,
to begin with some modern instances of what Lady
Julian calls " the word formed in mine understanding,"
the "ghostly showing" of the Cloud of Unknowing,
the interior audition and vision of the sixteenth-
* Prov. 29, 1 8.
<5p
THE PROPHETIC VISION 61
century mystics. As St. Theresa says, " a little fire,
also, is as much fire as a great fire, and yet there is a
visible difference between them," and the little fire of
the later seer will serve to illustrate the nature of the
great fire of the early one.
Sundar Singh distinguishes between this mode of
hearing and the exterior auditions spoken of in the
last chapter. " Some years ago ... I used to hear
voices, and that with these ears (that is, not in the
spiritual language of the heavenly world)." 1 St.
Theresa says : " The words are very distinctly formed ;
but by the bodily ear they are not heard. They are,
however, much more clearly understood than they
would be if they were heard by the ear. It is im-
possible not to understand them, whatever resistance
we may off er. . . . There is another test more decisive
still. The words formed by the understanding effect
nothing ; but when our Lord speaks, it is at once
word and work. ... It seems to me that there is as
much difference between these two locutions [divine
and auto-suggested] as there is between speaking and
listening, neither more nor less ; for when I speak, as
I have just said, I go on with my understanding,
arranging what I am saying ; but if I am spoken to by
others I do nothing else but listen." 2 Another time
she tells how, when she came to a dead stop in her
writing, " God enlightened my understanding at one
time suggesting the words, at another shewing me how
to use them." 3 With this compare Finney's account
of how at a critical moment " this passage of Scripture
[Jeremiah 29, 12. 13] seemed to drop into my mind
with a flood of light." 4
1 Sadhu, p. 150. 2 Life, xxv, 2-6.
3 Life, xviii, jo; cp. Matt. 10, 19; Deut. 18, 18; Exod. 4, 12;
Acts 4, 8. * Finney, p, 14.
62 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Suso tells how "one day he was rapt in ecstasy,
and his bodily senses being abstracted, it was sweetly
said to him within his soul : I will show thee to-day
the high nobility of My life, and how a suff erer should
offer up his sufferings to the praise and glory of a
loving God." 1
Nicholas of Basle was praying the night before his
wedding in a sudden repentance, " And at that moment
there spoke to me a voice the sweetest and gladdest
that ears have ever heard, and thus it spake. ' Thou
beloved of my soul, know thou that I Who speak to
thee am the Lord of Lords, and the Lord of all things
that have ever been, or that ever shall be, and thou
hast done well that thou hast given up time for eternity,
for few there are who do so in these evil days. . . .' "
A year later he heard the voice again, and then after
two more years of spiritual struggle he was praying,
"And as I spake these words there shone around me,
as it were, a fair and blessed light, the light that is love ;
and from the glory of that light a radiance filled my
soul, so that whether I were in the body or out of the
body I cannot tell, for my eyes were opened to see the
wonder and the beauty that are far above the mind
of man, and I cannot speak thereof for there are no
words to tell it. ... And as I was marvelling thereat
and rejoicing greatly, I heard as it were the gladdest
and sweetest voice, which came not from myself, but
yet it came to me as one who spake within me, but
it was not my thoughts that it spake." 2
Fox, in his Journal of 1674, tells that when he was
lying very ill in prison, " yet the invisible power did
secretly support me, and conveyed refreshing strength
1 Suso, chap, xxxiii.
2 Three Friends of God, pp. 227-40.
THE PROPHETIC VISION 63
unto me, even when I was so weak that I was almost
speechless. One night as I was lying awake upon my
bed in the glory of the Lord which was over all, it was
said to me, that the Lord had a great deal more
work for me to do for Him, before He took me to
Himself." 1
It will be noticed that in the two latter instances
the words were accompanied by a vision of glory such
as we read of in Isaiah 6, and Ezekiel and the Revelation.
John Woolman gives a modification of the same experi-
ence, dated 13 May, 1757. He lay awake one night.
" After this, I went to sleep again ; in a short time I
awoke ; it was yet dark, and no appearance of day or
moonshine, and as I opened mine eyes I saw a light in
my chamber, at the apparent distance of five feet,
about nine inches in diameter, of a clear, easy bright-
ness, and near its centre the most radiant. As I lay
still looking upon it without any surprise, words were
spoken to my inward ear, which filled my whole inward
man. They were not the effect of thought, nor any
conclusion in relation to the appearance, but as the
language of the Holy One spoken in my mind." 2
This may throw a little light on the experience behind
such expressions as " the same night the word of the
Lord came unto Nathan, saying ... According to all
these words, and according to all this vision, so did
Nathan speak unto David " 3 ; "I saw in the night." 4
St. Paul's visions recorded in Acts seem to have been
seen most frequently by night. 6 It may, of course,
mean in a dream, but may also mean that the night
was a quiet time, when the necessary stillness of soul
1 Fox, p. 454. 2 Woolman, p. 84.
3 i Sam. 7, 4. 17. * Zech. i, 8.
B Acts 1 6, 9; 18, 91 23, n; 27, 23.
64 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
could be obtained that the seer might " reflect as a
mirror the glory of the Lord."
The foregoing have been instances of interior audi-
tions given when the auditor was, if not in a state of
spiritual calm, at all events physically uninterrupted.
The following example shows how spiritual calm was
made possible under circumstances of constant physical
hardship and interruption. " Jesus Himself drew near
and talked with us by the way ; and the words that
He spoke to us, they were spirit and they were life.
It was literally as though I heard His living voice
beside me. Now He was breathing in my ear, ' Fear
not them which kill the body, and after that have no
more that they can do.' . . . And I knew it for
my Lord's own voice when the words echoed within :
' Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldest believe,
thou shouldest see the glory of God 1 ' " 1
As was said above, the prophets give very few hints
of the mode in which they received their revelations.
The following instances are perhaps those which come
nearest to giving us any information. In 2 Kings
20, 4 we read that as Isaiah was returning home, leaving
Hezekiah sick unto death, " the word of the Lord came
unto him " telling him to return. The circumstances
make it probable that it was an interior audition.
When the city became hysterical at the approach of
the Assyrians and turned to feasting instead of to
prayer, "the LORD of Hosts revealed Himself in mine
ears : ' Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from
you till ye die/ saith the Lord." 2 Again, " He wakeneth
mine ear to hear as they that are taught. The Lord
God hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious,
1 1000 Miles, pp. 134-5.
2 Isaiah 22, 14 ; cp. i Sam. 9, 15 marg.
THE PROPHETIC VISION 65
neither turned away backward." 1 It is at all events
possible to take these passages as referring to hearing
with the inward ear, and also that in Kings, 2 , when
the wife of Jeroboam in disguise was on her way to
Ahijah, " and the LORD said unto Ahijah, ' Behold the
wife of Jeroboam cometh.' "
One more passage from the writings of Marmaduke
Stevenson, one of the Quaker " Boston Martyrs " of
1659, shows a similarity to the call of Amos, when
" the LORD took me from following the flock, and the
LORD said unto me, 'Go, prophesy unto my people
Israel. ' " 3
" In the beginning of the year 1655 I was at the
plough in the east part of Yorkshire, in Old England,
near the place where my outward being was ; and as
I walked after the plough, I was filled with the love
and presence of the living God, which did ravish my
heart when I felt it, for it did increase and abound in
me like a living stream, so did the life and love of God
run through me like precious ointment giving a pleasant
smell, which made me to stand still. And as I stood a
little still, with my heart and mind stayed upon the
Lord, the word of the Lord came to me in a still small
voice, which I did hear perfectly, saying to me in the
secret of my heart and conscience, ' I have ordained
thee a prophet unto the nations,' and at the hearing
of the word of the Lord I was put to a stand, seeing
that I was but a child for such a weighty matter. So,
at the time appointed, Barbadoes was set before me,
unto which I was required of the Lord to go." 4 Here
we have a correspondence with Jeremiah. 5 " Then
said I, ' Ah, Lord GOD ! behold, I cannot speak : for I
1 Isa. 50, 4. 5. 2 i Kings 14, 5.
3 Amos 7, 15. " C. L. F. T., L. F. T., p. 32.
6 Jer. i, 6-7.
66 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
am a child/ But the LORD said unto me, ' Say not, I
am a child : to whomsoever I shall send thee thou
shalt go, and whatsoever I shall command thee thou
shalt speak/ "
As a rule, however, the prophets confine themselves
to saying " The word of the Lord came " (about 125
times), or "The Lord spake, saying" (about 80), or
some such expression. Ezekiel speaks of the Spirit
giving strength to hear. 1 St. Theresa in some measure
corroborates this " My meaning is, that so exceeding
great is the power of this vision, when our Lord shows
the soul much of His grandeur and majesty, that it is
impossible, in my opinion, for any soul to endure it,
if our Lord did not succour it in a most supernatural
way, by throwing it into a trance or ecstasy, whereby
the vision of the divine presence is lost in the fruition
thereof." 2
So far we have spoken of auditions, things heard. The
prophets also say " I saw," " He shewed me " ; they
speak of visions ; the "seer" was one of the names of
the prophet (the title was growing obsolete when
I Samuel 9, 9 was written, but Gad is called " David's
seer" in 2 Samuel 24, u, and it seems to have come
into use again later, since the Chronicler uses it more
than any other writer). The prophet was a man who
both heard and saw what others did not. This is
brought out in the forcible words of Isaiah, "The Lord
hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and
closed your eyes, the prophets, and your heads, the
seers, hath he covered. [To ' uncover the ear ' is one
of the descriptions of an audition. 3 ] And all vision is
become to you as the words of a book that is sealed." 4
1 Ezek. 2, 2; 3, 24 ; cp. Dan. 8, 18 ; 10, 7-10. 18.
Life, xxviii, 14. 3 i Sam. 9, 15 marg.
4 Isa. 29, lo-ii.
THE PROPHETIC VISION 67
And again, "they are gone astray through strong drink,
they err in vision, they stumble in judgment." 1
Four times Amos says, " Thus the Lord God shewed
me : and behold . . . " 2 Jeremiah " saw " the rod
of an almond tree, and a seething cauldron, 3 and " the
Lord, shewed me, and behold, two baskets of fruit." 4
These latter may have been actual baskets of offerings
used as a starting-place for the revelation, as elsewhere
was the potter, but Ezekiel "sees" from beginning
to end, and even when he does not mention a vision
his descriptions are pictorial. He was emphatically a
" seer."
Stephen " saw " "the Son of Man standing on the
right hand of God." 5 The expression occurs again and
again in Revelation, though the writer tells us that
both for what he saw and heard he was " in the Spirit." 6
Sometimes, as said above, at a more or less elemen-
tary stage of development, revelation is made by
dreams. These are still held in parts of the East to be
an authoritative channel of revelation, and mission-
aries, especially in Egypt and Persia, can tell remarkable
stories of men who have been led to become inquirers,
and often converts, through some significant dream.
It appears that, in dealing with men, God uses that
form of communication which they are disposed to
accept as valid, without considering whether it would
be so regarded by our more sophisticated intelligences.
So in Genesis we find Abimelech, Jacob, Laban, and
Pharaoh instructed through dreams. 7 When Saul can
get answer in no other way he tries to get it by dreams; 8
1 Isa. 28, 7. 2 Amos 7, i. 4. 7 ; 8, i.
3 Jer. i, 11-13. * Jer. 24, i.
5 Acts 7, 55.
6 Rev. i, 10 ; cp. also Dan. 8 and 10 passim.
7 Gen. 20, 36 ; 28, 10 ; 31, 24 ; 41, 25. 8 I Sam. 28, 6.
68 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
then, prophecy being dumb, dreams are again used in
the early chapters of St. Matthew, but they do not
appear to have been used for any communications that
have come down to us as definitely/' prophetic," and
Acts 1 mentions trances as the vehicle of vision.
Possibly, Luke the Greek did not feel the evidential
value of dreams to be so great as did Matthew the
Jew. He, moreover, distinguishes clearly between the
open vision of Cornelius, the trance of St. Peter, trances
and visions by night of St. Paul, the open vision of
Zacharias, and the speaking in the spirit of Simeon in a
way that seems to suggest a certain amount of investi-
gation of the subject, though he does not go into such
details about "intellectual" and "imaginary" visions
as does St. Theresa.
Before going on to notice modern examples it is
to be observed that the visions seen appear to have
been as a rule symbolic. Man cannot see the spiritual
verities direct he has to be taught by parable in sight
as well as in word, and thus in the face of the visions
recorded of Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and the rest, John
can still say with truth, " No man hath seen God at
any time." As Lady Julian says, 2 " And then shall
we see God face to face, homely and fully. The creature
which is made shall see and endlessly behold God
which is the maker. For thus may no man see God,
which is the maker and the life after, that is to say in
this deadly life. But when He of His special grace
will shew Himself here, He strengtheneth the creature
above itself, and He measureth the shewing after His
own will as it is profitable for the time."
The author of the Cloud of Unknowing is even
more definite. " For that they say of St. Martin and
1 Acts 10, 10 ; 22, 17. 2 Julian, chap. 55.
THE PROPHETIC VISION 69
St. Stephen, although they saw such things with their
bodily eyes, it was shewed but in miracle and in certi-
fying of thing that was ghostly. ... For howso His
body is in heaven standing, sitting, or lying wots no
man. . . . For if He shew Him lying, or standing, or
sitting, by revelation bodily to any creature in this
life, it is done for some ghostly bemeaning : not for
no manner of bodily bearing that he hath in heaven." 1
Dr. Skinner, after speaking of the early beginnings of
prophecy, continues : " This crude and fragmentary
conception of inspiration left far behind, visions and
auditions and mysterious inward promptings to speech
and action are still part of the prophet's experience,
but the field of revelation is no longer confined to them
alone. The meaning of the vision passes into the
prophet's thinking, and becomes the nucleus of a com-
prehensive view of God and the world from which
spring ever fresh intuitions of truth and calls to duty."
He goes on to say that this may be expressed in imagery.
The prophet interprets what he sees, and "the sub-
stance of the revelation is not the mere vision or
audition itself, but the truth which it has evoked or
symbolised in his mind." 2 Part of this merely puts
into modern words what the older writer says about
" ghostly bemeanings," and part which refers to the
fuller content of the vision will fall to be discussed in
a later chapter.
Again, in their account of the visions of the Sadhu,
Canon Streeter and Mr. Appasamy say : "He is not
only aware, but is urgent to insist, that the sights and
words he reports are but shadowy reflections of the
reality in other words, that they are essentially
symbolic." 3
1 Cloud, pp. 257-60. 2 P. and R., p. 211. 5 Sadhu, p. 141.
70 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
To come to the visions : St. Theresa describes what
she calls an "intellectual" vision, which may illustrate
St. Paul's experiences in Acts 23, n and 27, 23. " A
person who is in no ways expecting such a favour, nor
has ever imagined herself worthy of receiving it, is
conscious that Jesus Christ stands by her side, although
she sees Him neither with the eyes of the body nor of
the soul. . . . Whenever she desired to speak to His
Majesty in prayer, or even at other times, He seemed
so close that He could not fail to hear her." 1 At other
times He shows the soul " in a vision His most sacred
Humanity under whatever form He chooses ; either
as He was during His life on earth, or after His Re-
surrection. ... You must understand that though the
soul sees this for a certain space of time, it is no more
possible to continue looking at it than to gaze for a
long time on the sun . . . although its brightness does
not pain the interior sight in the same way as the sun's
glare injures our bodily eyes. The image is seen by
the interior sight alone." 2 Again, in the Life she
speaks of a vision she saw of Christ : " This vision,
though imaginary, I never saw with my bodily eyes,
nor, indeed, any other, but only with the eyes of the
soul. Those who understand these things better than
I do say that the intellectual vision is more. perfect
than this ; and this the imaginary vision, much more
perfect than those visions which are seen by the bodily
eyes. The latter kind of vision, they say, is the
lowest ; and it is by these that the devil can most
delude us." 3
In both books she gives a good many other details,
and then in the Foundations she leaves psychology
1 Int. Cas., VI, viii, 2, 4. 2 Ibid., VI, ix, 2, 3.
3 Life, xxviii, 5.
THE PROPHETIC VISION 71
and tells the story of two visions. One of a monk who
had made up his mind to render perfect obedience to
his superior. He was sent to dig in the garden after
a very tiring day, and as he was going down a path
" There our Lord appeared to him with the cross on
His shoulders, so wearied and worn out that he very
well could see that his own fatigue was nothing in
comparison of that." 1 The other story is that of
Dona Catalina Godinez who, when she professed in
I 575 told her that twenty years ago, desiring to find
the most perfect religious order that she might profess
in it, she had a dream in which she was introduced to
a convent where she saw the same sisters she was now
professed with, and was shown a Rule of which she
wrote down as much as she remembered, and after
much inquiry found it to be the rule of the Carmelites. 2
In the life of Catherine of Siena we are told that on
the day she received the habit of Penance she was
meditating and saw " before the eyes of her soul " a
vision of a tree full of fruit hedged about with thorns,
and a hill covered with fair-seeming corn which was,
however, withered within, and she understood that the
choice of her manner of life was set before her. 3
Suso tells us that after his penances had been going
on some twenty-two years " it seemed to his inward
vision that a noble youth came down from above," and
told him that he had been long enough in the lower
school, he must now come to a higher life. He " took
him by the hand and carried him, as it appeared to him,
into a land above the ken of sense." 4 After that he
gave up his austerities, but a few weeks later "his,
senses became abstracted, and it seemed to him that
1 Found., p. 34. * Ibid., p. 155.
8 C. of S., p. 38. * Suso, chap. xxi.
72 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
there came in a comely youth of a manly form," who
told him what his future sufferings should be. He was
terrified until " something spoke within him thus :
' Be of good cheer. I myself will be with, thee and I
will aid thee graciously to overcome all these unusual
trials.'" 1
Fox tells that being in Lancaster Castle in i664 2
"there was a great noise and talk of the Turks over-
spreading Christendom, and great fears entered many.
But one day, as I was walking in my prison chamber,
I saw the Lord's power turn against me, and that he
was turning back again. And I declared to some
what the Lord had let me see ... and within a month
after the news came that they had given him a defeat.
Another time, as I was walking in my chamber, with my
eye to the Lord, I saw the angel of the Lord with a
glittering drawn sword stretched southward, as though
the court had been all on fire. Not long after the wars
broke out with Holland, the sickness broke forth, and
afterwards the fire of London, so the Lord's sword was
drawn indeed."
Woolman tells of a vision which calls to mind St.
Paul's words, 3 "having the desire to depart and be
with Christ . . . yet to abide in the flesh is more
needful for your sake."
Woolman had been very ill and was thought to be at
the point of death. " After I had lain near ten hours
in this condition, I closed my eyes thinking whether I
might now be delivered out of the body ; but in these
awful moments my mind was livingly opened to behold
the church ; and strong engagements were begotten
in me for the everlasting well-being of my fellow-?
1 Suso, chap. 22. 2 Fox, p. 384.
3 Phil, i, 23. 24,
THE PROPHETIC VISION 73
creatures." 1 And he was willing to recover and serve
them. Again, in 1772, he records a vision in two parts,
the first purely symbolical, the second more pictorial.
" In a time of sickness, a little more than two years and
a half ago, I was brought so near the gates of death
that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to know
who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull, gloomy
colour between the south and the east, and was in-
formed that this mass was human beings in as great
misery as they could be, and live, and that I was mixed
with them, and that henceforth I might not consider
myself as a distinct or separate being. In this state I
remained several hours. I then heard a soft, melo-
dious voice, more pure and harmonious than any I had
heard with my ears before ; I believed it was the
voice of an angel who spake to the other angels : the
words were : ' John Woolman is dead.' " He wondered
what it meant. " I was then carried in spirit to the
mines where poor oppressed people were digging rich
treasures for those called Christians, and heard them
blaspheme the name of Christ, at which I was grieved,
for His name to me was precious. I was then informed
that these heathens were told that those who oppressed
them were the followers of Christ, and they said
among themselves : ' If Christ directed them to use us
in this sort, then Christ is a cruel tyrant.' ... As I
lay still for a time I at length felt a Divine power
prepare my mouth so that I could speak, and then I
said : ' I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I
live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' . . . Then
the mystery was opened and I perceived . . . that
the language 'John Woolman is dead ' meant no more
than the death of my own will." 2
1 Woolman, p. 211. z Ibid., pp. 239, 240.
74 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Bunyan tells of a symbolic vision, which was
apparently interior. " About this time the state and
happiness of these poor people at Bedford was thus,
in a kind of vision, presented to me." He saw them on
a sunny mountain, surrounded by a high wall, while
he was shivering outside in the cold. After a great
struggle he succeeded in getting through a narrow gate
in the wall, and joined them in the sun. 1
Dorothy Kerin gives an example of the visions of the
night, the expressions in which are reminiscent of some
of the descriptions in the Old Testament, though there
is a much freer use of adjectives. " One Sunday, in
the middle of the night, I was awakened out of my
sleep by the sound of exquisite music. Everywhere
there was a wonderful Glory-light ... the atmo-
sphere seemed to throb with ' Holy, Holy,- Holy,' and
I realised Heaven. Then a great blue mist cleared
and revealed three transcendent forms; on the left
hand I recognised the angel who had been sent to heal
me, on the right the Virgin Mary, and in the centre our
Lord. He held His hands over me, and in the palm of
each there shone a wonderful red jewel. . . . Great
rays of light streamed from the sacred hands and
permeated my whole being. The vision then slowly
faded and I was again in my bed." 2
Finally, Sundar Singh gives two points about these
interior visions and auditions which bear out St.
Theresa's more lengthy and elaborate descriptions.
" In Heaven I see not with bodily but with spiritual
eyes, and I was told that these spiritual eyes are the
same as those which all men will use after permanently
leaving the body." " When they speak to me they
put their thoughts into my heart in a single moment,
1 Grace Abounding, 53. 2 Kerin, p. 26.
THE PROPHETIC VISION 75
just as on earth one sometimes knows what a person is
going to say before he says it." 1 Elsewhere we read :
"The words are words, but they are neither heard nor
spoken, the sights are seen and yet not as if with
eyes." 2
So we come back to the prophetic expression of
having eyes and ears " opened," and to our Lord's
words, "he that hath ears to hear, let him hear." 3
It depends on the development of our spiritual faculties
how much we can see or hear of spiritual things. 4
But the prophet was not only to be a seer and
recounter of visions. The visions he saw were not of
private interpretation, as were most of those recounted
above. They were to exercise a definite effect on the
life of the nation ; they contained precepts which were
meant to be put into effect by the intelligent co-
operation of the seer. That being so, he cannot
simply give himself over to the enjoyment of the vision ;
he asks questions and receives explanations. The
visions containing these colloquies seem to belong to
the stage we are now dealing with, for St. Theresa says
that in a further stage the soul is taught without them.
" A person is far from thinking of seeing anything, no
idea of which has crossed the mind, when suddenly
the vision is revealed in its entirety. ... Meanwhile,
certain sublime truths have been so impressed on
the mind that it needs no other master, for, with no
effort of its own, Wisdom Himself .has enlightened its
former ignorance." 5 This seems to be the "spiritual
sight " which Lady Julian says she cannot fully
describe. Lady Julian herself asks questions and
receives explanations, as does also Sundar Singh, and
1 Sadhu, pp. 117, 1 1 8. 2 Ibid., p. 140.
3 Cp. John 8, 43. 47 ; g, 39-41-
4 i Cor. 2, 11-15. 6 Int. Cas., VI, ix, 7.
76 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
we find the same in Amos, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, and
Zechariah, and the Revelation.
" In these visions we have the most wonderful talks,"
says Sundar Singh. ..." There are very many things
which I see and hear there, and of which I have a clear
picture in my mind, but I can't express them, even in
Hindustani, much less in English, and some of them are
things that it would be no use even trying to express,
because their beauty would be lost if they could be
taken out of that world and put into this." 1 But
something of what the prophet saw had to be translated,
and that into an inflexible language. We inherit the
spiritual vocabulary they built up, but for a great deal
that they saw there can have been no vocabulary, and
they had to paint their teaching in broad lines of pic-
ture and parable, to our great advantage. Even then
it was not possible to make all clear, 2 but the prophet
was expected by his followers to see after a different
fashion from themselves, and his " dark speech "
would be likely to be transmitted by them if he had
already made a reputation as one who knew more of the
counsel of God than other men. If his word had been
proved true in short-period predictions there would be
grounds for preserving his predictions of a more distant
future, especially if it were not known how distant
that future was to be. The man, too, who could tell
what was had a right to declare what ought to be, in
social as well as religious matters.
In effect, we do find that of many of the prophets
there are recorded incidents of prediction and insight
which would serve to warrant the preservation of their
writings and sayings as having permanent as well as
immediate value. Elijah seems to have been absorbed
1 Sadhu, p. 1 19. 2 i Peter i, 10-12.
THE PROPHETIC VISION 77
by the need of strenuous action, and comparatively few
of his words are preserved. Of the later prophets we
have comparatively few deeds recorded, though the
impression is left that they were men of fearless action
in the power of the spirit. And it was the impression
they made of being " God-possessed," warranted by the
" signs " done in the name of the Lord, 1 that ensured
the preservation and partial acceptance of the revo-
lutionary social and moral teaching which they gave
in the same Name, teaching so revolutionary that
though we still preserve and admire it, we have not
yet had the practical faith to try it properly.
1 Deut. 1 8, 22.
CHAPTER VII
PREDICTION AND INSIGHT
PREDICTION, says Dr. Skinner, " is not a secon-
dary or accidental feature of Old Testament
prophecy even in its highest manifestations, but a
central interest round which all other forms of pro-
phetic activity ranged themselves." 1
This dictum marks a change from the " not foretelling
but forth-telling " of which we used to hear in recent
years. There is here, however, no intention to dis-
cuss prediction in general, only to take up such
instances of short-distance prediction as might serve
to authenticate the prophets' mission to their con-
temporaries, 2 and to add such modern instances as
may serve to illustrate them.
The two tests propounded in Deuteronomy, con-
tinuity with former revelation, and the giving of a
sign in the "Name " were, as has already been pointed
out, accepted by our Lord. 3 The confidence in the
power of the Name to take care of itself is illustrated
in Mark 9, 38-39 and in the story in Acts of the sons
of Sceva.* The Name did not work by magic, as was
supposed to be the case with other names of power, it
could only be used effectively by properly authorised
persons.
1 P. and R., p. 4. Deut. 18, 22.
1 Deut. 13, i ; 18,22; Mark 2, 8-n ; 7, 5-13.
* Acts 19, 13-16.
78
PREDICTION AND INSIGHT 79
The first of the authenticating instances after that
of Deborah, 1 are the signs given by Samuel to Saul. 8
They were of a perfectly neutral character, but would
serve as well as any others to maintain the ascendancy
of the prophetic over the kingly office, which was
Samuel's ideal. Later in the history Ahijah foretells
both the disruption of the kingdom and the hour of
the death of Jeroboam's son. 3
Elisha, sitting with the elders during the siege of
Samaria, prophesied that the siege would be raised
that night, and that there would be abundance of
provision in the city next day, and also that the
particular officer of the king who spoke with him should
not eat of it. 4 Several such predictions are recorded
of Isaiah. There is the prophecy of the captivity of
Egypt and Ethiopia ; 5 the prophecies relating to
Shebna and Eliakim ; 6 that of the destruction of
Assyria, and of Hezekiah's recovery and fifteen years
longer lease of life, together with the sign of the dial of
Ahaz. 7
It has been said that Amos's sign upon Amaziah 8 was
not fulfilled because the captivity of Israel did not
come until a generation after Amos. But after the
death of Jeroboam, who had given Amaziah his
appointment, there were three kings two of them
usurpers within the year, and it is quite possible that
a court favourite would fall with his master without
any need to wait for a national destruction.
Jeremiah's prediction of the death of Hananiah 9 had
its fulfilment within the year. His prophecy of the
1 Judges 4, g. 4 i Sam. 9, 15-10, 9.
3 i Kings ii, 26-39 ; 14, 6-14. * 2 Kings 6, 33-8, 13.
B Isa. 20. * Isa. 22.
7 Isa. 37 and 38. 8 Amos 7, 1 7.
Jer. 28, 15-17.
8o PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
seventy years' captivity and return was concerned
with a more distant event, 1 while his declaration that
Nebuchadnezzar would take Tahpanhes 2 had its nearer
fulfilment. Most of the single-oracle prophets whose
words are recorded in the historical books were bearers
of some such short - distance prediction. Ezekiel's
continual prophecy for many years that Jerusalem
must fall before the might of Babylon was really a
very obvious one, but the details concerning the king's
attempted escape and disguise would give it additional
effect.
These and other unrecorded fulfilments must not
only have given the prophet himself confidence in his
own message, as was shown by Jeremiah's act of faith
in buying the field against the return of his people ; 3
they had also their effect in the persistence of the
belief in the future Messianic age, which continued in
spite of all appearances to the contrary until Messiah
did come. It was possibly because the vision seen in
eternity had to be translated into terms of time that
the glorious consummation was expected to be so much
nearer than it actually was. The time-perspective was
lost , but the conviction endured .
This enduring conviction is, says St. Theresa, one of the
distinctive marks of a prophetic locution. Words of grace
or of instruction may be forgotten in time, " But as to
prophetic words, they are never forgotten, in my
opinion ; at least I have never forgotten any and yet
my memory is weak." 4 Again she says that one may
quite well forget -what men say. "Neither if they
prophesy of things to come, do we believe them as we
do these divine locutions, which leave us so convinced
1 Jer. 29, 10. cp. 20, 1-6; 30. 2 Jer. 43, 10.
3 Jer. 32. 4 Life, xxv, 10.
PREDICTION AND INSIGHT 81
of their truth, that although their fulfilment sometimes
seems utterly impossible, and we vacillate and doubt
about them, there still remains in the soul a certainty
of their verity which cannot be destroyed. Perhaps
everything may seem to militate against what was
heard, and years pass by, yet the spirit never loses its
belief that God will make use of means unknown to
men for the purpose, and that finally what was foretold
must surely happen ; as indeed it does." 1 " I know
by experience in many ways when these locutions come
from God. I have been told things two or three years
beforehand, which have all come to pass ; and in none
of them have I been hitherto deceived." 2
Palladius tells two stories of this kind ; the first of
Didymus, the blind scholar, might be accounted for
by clairvoyance. He told Palladius: "As I was
thinking one day about the life of the wretched Emperor
Julian ... it happened as I sat in my seat I was
overcome by sleep and I saw in a trance white horses
running with riders and proclaiming : Tell Didymus
to-day at the seventh hour Julian died. Rise and eat,
they said, and send to Athanasius the bishop, that he,
too, may know. And I marked, he said, the hour
and month and week and day, and it was found to be
so." Later Palladius went to see John of Lycopolis,
"who, having completed thirty years immured . . .
was accounted worthy of the gift of predictions. Among
other instances he sent various predictions to the
blessed Emperor Theodosius, one concerning Maximus
the tyrant, that he would conquer him and return from
the Gauls ; similarly he also gave him good news about
the tyrant Eugenius." After having told him certain
home truths, the hermit went on : " Many afflictions
1 Int. Gas., VI, iii, 11. a Life, xxv, 3.
82 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
are in store for you, and many times have you been
tempted to leave the desert " ; the devil, he said, had
been worrying him about his brother and sister, and
his father's health ; " Behold, then, I give you good
news ; both are saved, for both have renounced the
world . And as regards your father, at this very moment
he still has other years to live." 1
Fox tells of several predictions of his own which
were fulfilled. For a man of his professedly peaceful
principles he shows a great interest in the bad ends which
overtook his persecutors, especially if he had foretold
them. In 1653, " Being one day in Swarthmore Hall
when Judge Fell and Justice Benson were talking of
the news, and of the parliament then sitting, which
was called the Long Parliament, I was moved to tell
them that before that day two weeks the parliament
should be broken up, and the Speaker plucked out of
his chair. And that day two weeks, Justice Benson
coming hither again, told Judge Fell that now he saw
George was a true prophet, for Oliver had broken up
the Parliament." 2
In 1658 he records the well-known incident of how
he met Cromwell " riding into Hampton 'Court Park,
and before I came to him, as he rode at the head of his
life-guard, I saw and felt a waft (or apparition) of
death go forth against him ; and when I came to him
he looked like a dead man." 3 In the same year he
writes : " I had a sight and sense of the king's return a
good while before, and so had some others. I wrote
to Oliver several times, and let him know that while
he was persecuting God's people, they whom he
accounted his enemies were preparing to come upon
him. When some forward spirits that came among
1 Pall. pp. 52, 120-122. z Fox, p. in. 3 Ibid., p. 279.
PREDICTION AND INSIGHT 83
us would have bought Somerset House, that we might
have meetings in it, I forbade them to do so ; for I
then foresaw the king's coming in again. Besides,
there came a woman to me in the Strand, who had a
prophecy concerning King Charles's coming in, three
years before he came ; and she told me, that she must
go to him to declare it. ... I saw her prophecy was
true, and that a great stroke must come upon them in
power. ' ' 1 The following year, after making a prolonged
tour, " I returned to London, when General Monk was
come up thither, and the gates and posts of the city
were pulled down. Long before this I had a vision,
wherein I saw the city lie in heaps and the gates down;
and it was then represented to me, just as I saw it
several years after, lying in heaps, when it was burned." 3
It was perhaps only human nature for Fox to char-
acterise the disasters which befell the Puritans as the
punishment for their treatment of the Friends, and so
he writes a letter and says, " Was it not told you ? "
Among the spiritual gifts mentioned by St. Paul 3
is the " discerning of spirits." St. John also bids his
converts " believe not every spirit, but try the spirits." 4
" A certain amount of insight into character was expected
from men who had the Spirit. We see this specially
in our Lord, with His instant knowledge of the needs
of those with whom He came in contact. It is brought
out in His first greetings of Peter and Nathaniel, 5
and again in John 2, 24. 25, " He knew what was in
man." After Pentecost Peter by the Spirit discerned
the subterfuge of Ananias and Sapphira. 6
These sudden challenges were among the powers
which added to the prestige of the Old Testament
1 Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 288.
3 i Cor. 12, 10. 4 i John 4, i.
6 John i, 42, 47. Acts 5, 1-9.
84 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
prophet, and by their dramatic character lent themselves
to preservation in stories. It was Ahijah's sudden
greeting, " Come in, thou wife of Jeroboam ; why
feignest thou thyself to be another ? For I am sent to
thee with heavy tidings," 1 which probably fixed the
accompanying prophecy in people's minds. No less
than three stories of Elisha deal with the same power,
that of Gehazi and Naaman, of his services to the king
as intelligence officer, and his interview with Hazael. 2
Such powers might not have the same evidential force
now as they did then, but, as we said before, God
uses the methods which appeal to the men with whom
He is dealing, even if they do not necessarily appeal
to us.
We find, however, in history that such insight has
been of the 'greatest use to teachers of spiritual things.
John of Lycopolis, of whom we spoke in the last,
chapter, had the gift. Palladius was interrupted in a
conversation with him by the coming of the ruler of
the district, and John turned to talk to the latter.
Palladius went a little way off, feeling annoyed, and
was contemplating going away altogether, when John
sent his interpreter, saying, "Go, tell that brother,
'Do not be petty-minded. I am just going to dismiss
the ruler and talk to you.' " And when his turn came,
John gave him a lecture on his attitude. 3
Anthony too, had similar powers. Palladius tells
the story of Eulogius and the cripple, and how when
they had got on each other's nerves past bearing,
they had gone to ask advice of Anthony. He tells
how, sitting in the dark, Anthony called Eulogius out
of the party by name and city, though he had been
1 i Kings 14, 6. 2 2 Kings 5, 25 ; 6, 8 ; 8, n.
3 Pall., p. 122.
PREDICTION AND INSIGHT 85
told neither, and knew also the state of the pair and
foretold their speedy, peaceful deaths. 1
Catherine of Siena prayed for the grace of seeing the
state of such souls as she might converse with in order
that she might the more be moved to seek their salva-
tion, and, says Fr. Raymund, "saw more distinctly
the souls than the bodies of those who approached
her." He reproved her for allowing some signs of
homage. " God knows," she replied, "I do not often
notice the outward gestures of those who come to see
me ; I am so engaged in beholding their souls, that I
pay little attention to their bodies." 2 Sin had to her
an offensive odour. The story is told that when she
had gone to Avignon to visit the Pope, some of the
fair dames of the court were curious to see her. One
day a lady appeared who seemed to Fr. Raymund a
most devout person, modest in bearing and edifying in
conversation, and he was considerably disturbed when
Catherine turned her back on her and would have
nothing to do with her, and took the Saint to task
for it. "Oh, Father," she said, "if you had been
conscious as I was of the stench of sin that made itself
sensible whilst that woman was talking to us, I think it
would verily have turned you sick." Later on, when
he had made inquiries, he found that Catherine was
quite right. 3
Fox gives an almost identical account of his experi-
ence in 1647 : " The Lord shewed me that the natures
of those things which were hurtful without, were
within in the hearts and minds of wicked men. ... I
cried to the Lord, saying ' Why should I be thus,
seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils ? '
The Lord answered, That it was needful I should have
1 Ibid., 93. 95- ' C. of S., p. 87. 8 Ibid., p. 368.
86 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all
conditions ? " 1
John Woolman found that his habit of waiting upon
God brought him into truer relation to men, so that
he could without offence speak very straight to them
about the question of slavery which was ever on his
mind. "It is good for thee to dwell deep, that thou
mayest feel and understand the spirits of people," he
said. 2 Another time he says he went to Meeting " in
which I sat in bowedness of spirit, and being baptised
into feeling of the state of some present, the Lord gave
us a heart-tendering season." 3
There are many people who have such gifts on the
purely mental plane, but Woolman seems to imply
something distinctive, a sort of spiritual sympathy as
opposed to a merely psychic telepathy, much as we are
told that there is a difference between spiritual and
mental healing.
In speaking of these signs given to give authority
to the prophetic message, no mention has been made of
the miracles attributed to the prophets. They do not
come within the scope of the present inquiry, but there
is an amount of similar illustrative matter which opens
the question whether it is not possible that a new
relation to the Creator may in some cases involve a
new relation to the creation.
1 Fox, p. 17. 2 Woolman, p. 149. 3 Ibid., p. 197.
CHAPTER VIII
THE THIRD DEGREE OF VISION
IT will be remembered that Julian of Norwich spoke
of a third manner of vision, a "spiritual sight"
which she found indescribable . St . Theresa gives many
particulars of ecstasy, rapture, and intellectual vision,
which all share this characteristic, that they go beyond
the simpler ' ' word formed in mine understanding," and
do not seem necessarily to convey any message for
transmisssion. It is therefore difficult to assert that
there are signs of them in the prophetic accounts
which are less concerned with the personal experience of
the prophet than with the present and future condition
of his people, and with his own authorisation to act as
God's ambassador to them. But a brief examination
of some of St. Theresa's data may throw a little light
on the subject of our inquiry.
" I was in prayer one day," she says, " when I saw
Christ close by me, or, to speak more correctly, felt
Him ; for I saw nothing with the eyes of the body,
nothing with the eyes of the soul. . . ." It is not,
she says, as if a blind person or one in the dark was
aware of someone else in the room. " The darkness is
not felt ; only He renders Himself present to the soul
by a certain knowledge of Himself which is more clear
than the sun." This is an intellectual vision, and
differs from the "imaginary " vision or interior audition
G 87
88 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
before described, because in the latter " the soul seems
to have other ears wherewith it hears ; and He forces
it to listen, and will not let it be distracted," but in the
intellectual vision " even that little which is nothing
more than the bare act of listening, which is granted to
it in the other case, is now out of its power. It finds
its food prepared and eaten ; it has nothing more to do
but to enjoy it. It is as if one without ever learning,
without ever taking the pains even to learn to read,
and without studying any subject whatever, should
find himself in possession of all knowledge, not knowing
how or whence it came to him. . . .* These two
kinds of visions come almost always together, and
they do so come ; for we behold the excellency and
beauty and glory of the most Holy Humanity with the
eyes of the soul. And in the other way I have spoken
of that of intellectual vision we learn how He is God,
is mighty, can do all things, commands all things,
governs all things, and fills all things with His love." 2
In another place she gives a slightly different
description. " God speaks to the soul in another way,
by a certain intellectual vision. ... It takes place
far within the innermost depths of the soul, which
appears to hear distinctly, in a most mysterious
manner, with its spiritual hearing, the words spoken
to it by our Lord Himself." 3 Speaking of ecstasy, she
says, " While the soul is in this suspension, our Lord
favours it by discovering to it secrets, such as heavenly
mysteries and imaginary visions which admit of
description afterwards, because they remain so im-
printed on the memory that it never forgets them.
But when the visions are intellectual they are not thus
1 ? Cp. Acts 4, 13. 2 Life, xxvii, 3, 10 ; xxviii, 14.
3 Int. Cos., VI, iii, 19.
THE THIRD DEGREE OF VISION 89
easily related, some of those received at such a time
being so sublime that it is not fitting for man while
living in this world to understand them in a way that
can be told." 1 Some of this tallies closely with St.
Paul's account of his rapture, 2 especially when later
she goes on to describe what she calls "the flight of the
spirit." " With the swiftness of a bullet fired from a
gun, an upward flight takes place in the interior of the
soul. . . . Although noiseless, it is too manifest a
movement to be any illusion, and the soul is quite
outside itself ; at least, that is the impression made
upon it." " She cannot tell . . . whether her spirit
remains within her body or not. She feels that she
has been wholly transported into another and very
different region from that in which we live, where a
light so unearthly is shown that if during her whole
lifetime she had been trying to picture it, and the
wonders seen, she could not possibly have succeeded.
In an instant her mind learns so many things at once
that if the imagination and intellect spent years in
striving to enumerate them it could not recall a
thousandth part of them," 3 but " neither the bodily
eyes, however, nor the eyes of the soul see anything,
for these visions and many other things impossible to
describe are revealed by some wonderful intuition that
I am unable to explain." 4
Further details are given by both Fox and the Sadhu.
Sundar Singh says, " There are pearls in the sea, but
to get them you have to dive to the bottom. Ecstasy
is a dive to the bottom of spiritual things." 5 Else-
where we are told " the words are words, but they are
neither heard nor spoken, the sights are seen and yet
1 Int. Cas., VI, iv, 5. 2 2 Cor. 12, 1-4.
3 Int. Cas., VI, v, 10, 8. * Ibid., VI, v, 9.
5 Sadhu, p. 132.
90 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
not as if with eyes." " There is no language which
will express the things which I see and hear in the
spiritual world ; I am like a dumb man who can taste
and enjoy the sweets that are given to him, but cannot
express or explain it to others." 1
Fox tells how " one Brown " prophesied about him
when on his death-bed. " When this man was buried,
a great work of God fell upon me, to the admiration of
many who thought I had been dead. ... I saw into
that which was without end, things which cannot be
uttered, and of the greatness and infinitude of the love
of God which cannot be expressed by words. . . . I saw
the harvest white, and the seed of God lying thick on the
ground, as ever did wheat that was sown outwardly,
and none to gather it." 2 And in the following year,
after he had been at Mansfield, " Now was I come up in
Spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of
God. All things were new ; and all creation gave
another smell unto me than before, beyond what words
can utter. . . . Great things did the Lord lead me
into and wonderful depths were opened unto me,
beyond what can by words be declared ; but as people
come into subjection to the Spirit of God, and grow up
in the image and power of the Almighty, they may
receive the Word of Wisdom, that opens all things,
and come to know the hidden unity in the Eternal
Being." 3
From these quotations emerge certain facts. Those
who saw the kind of visions described can give very
little account of them, because they transcend our
language, indeed they do not always remain in the
memory, but they exercise a profoundly modifying
effect upon the outlook and sense of values of the seer.
1 Sadhu, p. 140. 2 Fox, pp. 18-19. 3 Ibid., p. 25.
THE THIRD DEGREE OF VISION 91
As St. Theresa says, 1 the vision entirely changes the
view of this life. Nothing is to be prized in comparison
with the riches of heaven and the knowledge of God ;
and we see this same transmutation of values in
the prophets. Had they, too, undergone some such
experience which gave that ground and background to
all their teaching ; not so much a direct message, as a
general disposition of mind out of which comes their
considered attitude to life, and which colours all their
teaching ? A good deal of teaching which is not given
as a definite message seems to be based upon some
such intuition of truth. Many teachers before them
have given virtuous maxims, but they have not been
enforced as belonging to the very stuff of the world by
men who have seen into the eternal verities, into the
truth of life personal and national, and of God's
purpose for it . And from this vision of the law of God 's
working comes the realisation of the conditional nature
of prophecy. God has not made this world a rigid
bed of Procrustes into which men have to fit according
to their destiny whatever they do . God in making man
in His own image has made him to some extent a
causal agent, and, seeing this, the prophets first dis-
covered the individual and first wrote history. 2
In the prophetic history of the kingdoms we have two
outstanding figures who produced cause, " Jeroboam
the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin," and to
whom in consequence the downfall of Israel is traced,
and David, for whose sake the Judean dynasty was
preserved. This problem, then, confronts the* seer.
God's good purpose must stand, yet even David has
not sufficed to save a people bent on going astray. So
when the destruction of the nation is inevitable the
1 Int. Cas., VI, iv, 14. a Jer. 18, 1-12.
92 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
search begins for that " man " who shall suffice for its
restoration. Jeremiah * can see none, nor can Ezeldel 2
find one who will, as Moses or Phinehas, "stand in the
gap " to deliver his people. 3 Deutero-Isaiah feels
after him throughout the " servant " passages, until 4 he
sees the vision of the man who shall be adequate to
the task. There is throughout the prophetic books a
feeling for law, of cause and effect. "Because . . .
therefore/' is repeated again and again. But whatever
men may do, the vision of the prophet has taught him
two things. God's purpose for man is good, and He is
able to bring it to pass.
There are two signs which may bear on this question
of the " intellectual " vision in the case of the prophets.
It will be remembered that our examples spoke of
the difficulty of describing the manner by which
that which was neither really seen nor heard was
apprehended. In Mysticism Evelyn Underhill speaks
of the difference in the number of vibrations which
determines whether we perceive a thing by sight
or hearing, and suggests that, apart from our physical
bodies and their apparatus, we may have some means of
perceiving which is neither hearing nor seeing. In this
connection the new instrument by which the blind can
hear the letters of a book by means of an optophone is
of interest. In some, at all events, of the experiences of
the prophet the distinction between sight and hearing
seems to have been blurred, and he says " The word
that Isaiah the son of Amos saw." 5 Habakkuk so
mingles the two that it seems indifferent to him which
word he uses. " I will . . . look forth to see what
He will speak with me. ... And the LORD answered
1 Jer. 5, i. * Ezek. 22, 30-31.
3 Ps. 106, 23. 30. 4 Isa. 53.
5 Isa. 2, i ; cp. Micah i, i ; Amos i, i.
THE THIRD DEGREE OF VISION 93
me and said, ' Write the vision.'" 1 "This is the
word that the LORD hath shewed me." 2 It seems to
imply that in some cases there was a mode of apprehen-
sion which could not be strictly called either.
A little light is thrown on the point by an expression
in Dorothy Kerin's book. 3 Speaking of a vision of
angels she says : " Their movements made lovely
music . ' ' Further light is given in the following account
by Frances Ridley Havergal of how she once saw music.
She writes on Sept. 29, 1874 : "In the train I had
one of those curious musical visions which only very
rarely visit me. I hear strange and very beautiful
chords, generally full, slow and grand, succeeding each
other in most interesting sequences. I do not invent
them. I could not, they pass through my mind and I
only listen. . . . It is so interesting, the chords seem
to fold into each other and die away down into music of
most exquisite softness and then they unfold and open
out as if great curtains . were being withdrawn one
behind another. . . . This time there was an added
feature ; I seemed to hear depths and heights of sound
beyond the scale which human ears can receive, keen,
far-up octaves, like vividly tinkling starlight of music,
and mighty, slow vibrations of gigantic strings going
down into the grand thunders of depths, octaves below
anything otherwise appreciable as musical notes.
Then, all at once, it seemed as if my soul had got a new
sense, and I could see this inner music as well as hear
it ; and then it was like gazing down into marvellous
abysses of sound and up into dazzling regions of what to
the eye, would have been light and colour, but to this
new sense was sound. Wasn't it odd? It lasted
1 Hab. 2, 1-2. 2 Jer. 38, 21.
3 Kerin, p._8.
94 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
about half an hour." 1 If it had not been for such
experiences there would perhaps have been little to
notice in the expressions quoted above from the
prophets, but with such illustrations they give a hint
of a possible new mode of apprehension.
There is another point which may be illustrated in
this connection. It has been said that we lose much
of the prophet's vision through the necessity which lay
upon him to focus it down into words. The bigger the
vision the more it has to be reduced to get it into our
language. On the other hand, when God uses a word
to the prophet, it seems to open a door into a far larger
connotation, and the vision of what may be a very
simple thing seems to carry with it far more than its
face value. This is the case, for example, in Jeremiah
i, 11-13, Amos 8, 2-3, and Habakkuk 2, 1-3. In each
case a little apparently conveys a great deal. St,
Theresa again says, speaking of intellectual visions,
"In a manner which I cannot explain these communica-
tions, without any further explanations, frequently give
us to understand far more than is implied by the words
themselves," and again, of an imaginary vision,
"Although no words are pronounced the spirit is
taught many truths." 2
Julian of Norwich gives two incidents in which the
same feature is brought out. First, " And in this He
shewed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel-nut
lying in the palm of my hand ; and to my understand-
ing it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon
and thought, ' What may this be ? ' And I was
answered generally thus : ' It is all that is made.' I
marvelled how it might last, for methought it might
fall suddenly to nought for littleness. And I was
1 Memorials, p. 152. 2 Int. Cas., VI, iii, 2 ; VI, v, <j.
THE THIRD DEGREE OF VISION 95
answered in mine understanding : ' It lasts, and ever
shall, for God loves it.' And so all-thing hath its being
through the love of God. And in this little thing I saw
three parts." She then goes on for three pages
expounding the further teaching arising out of her
perception of the vision. 1
In the next chapter she says again : " And in that
time that our Lord shewed this that I have now said in
ghostly sight, I saw the bodily sight lasting of the
plenteous bleeding of the head [of the crucifix] . And as
long as I saw that sight I said oftentimes, Benedicite
Domine. In this first shewing of our Lord I saw six
things in mine understanding. ' ' She enumerates them,
and they are big things, but so far all the vision
recorded is that of the bleeding of the crucifix and the
sight of the cosmos. " And the bodily sight ceased ;
and the ghostly sight dwelt in mine understanding."
This is the story as it is set out in the first draft
of the Revelations, hardly more than a pamphlet. But
by the meditations of years, more and more was opened
from the original visions (for apparently she had no
more) till the final edition is a considerable sized book
of deep thought.
Prof. Pratt speaks of this slow formulation of truth
perceived. "... This feeling is invariably crystal-
lised about some central idea, some intellectual cer-
tainty, which comes to the mystic as a revelation of
truth, and which he usually has no difficuly in defining
and communicating. It does not come to him, to be
sure, in the form of a clearly expressed judgment, but
rather as an immediate intuition of a reality, which
only later on he is able to formulate into a perfectly
definite proposition." 2
1 Comfortable Words, chap. 4. * Rel. Con,, p. 349.
96 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
We cannot on such very faint indications claim to
prove that intellectual visions formed a part of the
prophetic experience. But what we know of that ex-
perience is necessarily like that part of an iceberg which
appears above water. It indicates a much deeper life
than is visible. A life of very deep communion with
God was essential for men who had to go against the
whole current of contemporary thought, and who
attained to a vision of the purposefulness of the life of
the race, not only of their own nation , which no one
else had at the time when they taught.
It seems, then, not wholly impossible that some of
their declarations may arise rather from this back-
ground of experience than from an immediate com-
mission or message.
CHAPTER IX
ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS
r i ^HERE is one occurrence which is frequent in
1 prophetic experience. The prophet is told to
go somewhere and to do something, or sometimes just
told to go, and wait till he arrives for his instructions.
Sometimes the thing he is told to do appears almost
unreasonable until time makes clear why it was com-
manded.
Some of the things the prophet was bidden to do,
while they put a severe test on his obedience, were yet
clearly comprehensible as a means of bringing some
fact forcibly and continuously before the eyes of people
who might pay little attention to the spoken word only.
Such, for instance, was Isaiah's two years " naked and
bare-foot/' 1 or Jeremiah's yoke, 2 or, again, Ezekiel's
acted siege of Jerusalem, and of the king's flight. 3
The prophet of the Old, as the apostle of the New
Testament, was the " slave " of the Lord, and as such
prompt and unquestioning obedience was required of
him. He might be bidden to go to some place for a
purpose which was not revealed till he arrived, and he
had to face the possibility of making a public fool of
himself by acting on what he believed to be his
Master's commands. Was some such fear at the
bottom of John Baptist's question, " Art thou He that
1 Isa. 20. 2 Jer. 27; cp. Acts 21, 10.
3 Ezek. 4, 1-5, 17; 12, 1-13.
97
98 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
should come ? " l Samuel is told to go down to Beth-
lehem and anoint one of Jesse's sons, but he is not told
which, and has to pass the whole family in review be-
fore arriving at the right man . Elijah, after denouncing
famine upon Israel, is sent to two unlikely places for
shelter, and then with apparently no instructions sent
back to Ahab. 2 Amos says, " The LORD took me from
following the flock, and the LORD said unto me, ' Go,
prophesy unto My people Israel.' " 3 Jeremiah goes
down to the potter's to hear the word. 4 Cornelius and
Peter are both bidden to act on trust, one to send for
a wholly unknown man, to hear from him an unknown
message ; the other to go and visit a Gentile-^a course
of action opposed to his whole upbringing, and which
would certainly be condemned by the rigorist party at
Jerusalem. 5
In Mrs. Trotter's Life of Lord Radstock, two such
stories follow closely on each other. " When living at
Southsea he was awakened at three in the morning by
a strong impulse to dress and go out. He at first tried
to resist it, but so persistent was it that in the cold
winter morning he rose and went out to the common,
where he found a solitary man. That man in anguish
of soul had come out in his despair. God's servant met
him, and then and there light dawned and the burden
rolled away." 6 And again : he was one day apparently
going to be late for a meeting and was reminded of it.
" His reply was that the Lord would not let him go yet,
and when asked whether that meant that he had been
mistaken in appointing the meeting, he said no, it was
all right, but he could not go yet. He said he did not
know why the Lord kept him waiting. Shortly after,
1 Matt. 11,3. 2 i Kings 17, 2. 8 ; 18, i.
3 Amos 7, 15. 4 Jer. 18, i.
*> ActS 10, 5. 20. 6 P. 120.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS 99
a telegram quite unexpectedly was handed to him."
It turned out to be important, and he was still able to
get to the meeting in time to do his part. 1
Another instance is to be found in the Life
of Hudson Taylor ; in fact, the whole book is full of
illustrations of the subject, but two must suffice. He
was ill, and was ordered nourishing food, but soon was
at the end of his money. Some months before he had
advanced money to a poor woman on account of her
sailor husband's pay. Then, going to draw the pay at
the office, he was told the man had deserted his ship,
and the money was forfeited. On this occasion he was
just able with great difficulty to get downstairs, when
he felt " as if He were directing my mind to the con-
clusion to go again to the shipping office and inquire
again about the wages I had been unable to draw."
He thought it might be " some mental process of my
own rather than His guidance and teaching," especially
as he had no means of getting to the office, and had
barely been able with help to get downstairs. " The
assurance was brought vividly home to me that what-
ever I asked of God in the Name of Christ would be
done . . . that what I had to do was to seek strength
for the long walk, to receive it by faith, and set out
upon it." Which accordingly he did, though, as he
said, " I never took so much interest in shop windows
as I did on that journey," and in due course got from
Soho to Cheapside. Arrived at the office, he found that
there had been a mistake the deserter had- been
another man of the same name, He therefore received
the money due to him, which was sufficient to pay his
doctor and take him home to Yorkshire and also pay
for an omnibus back to Soho. 2
1 P. 129. H. T., pp. 167-9,
zoo PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
The other instance is the end of the story of Wang
the farmer, who was cited as an example of exterior
audition. He went to Ning-po, as he had been in-
structed by the voice, and for some time supported
himself by selling grass to the townsfolk, but found no
one who could help him on religious matters. At last
one day he heard a working-man talking in a tea-shop
about the " Jesus-doctrine," and the forgiveness of
sins, and introduced himself to inquire further. He
found the man came from his own neighbourhood, and
was one of Hudson Taylor's converts. His master had
dismissed him because he refused to work on Sunday,
and had gone round to all the members of his Guild,
asking them to promise not to engage the man when
he came round on Monday, seeking work. They did as
they were asked, and as he could get no work the
Christian used his enforced holiday in preaching. So
doing, he met Wang, and was the means of his con-
version. He got a job next day, for he was a clever
workman, and while the new master had promised not
to engage him on Monday, he had said nothing about
Tuesday ! l
Miss Amy Wilson Carmichael, whose name is known
in connection with her home at Dohnavur for the rescue
of Temple children in India, has written a little book
called Nor Scrip, telling of the way in which the
work has been supported entirely by prayer and with-
out appeals. One story out of many tells how she had
lost a case at law, and the judge decreed that she was
to pay heavy costs. " Three weeks before the bill was
sent in, a man in London, manager of a well-known
business house, was wakened and caused to understand
that he was to send a cheque to us next day. He was
i H. T., p. 474.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS 101
also caused to pray for us very earnestly, and having
committed us, with full assurance that help and com-
fort had reached us, he slept again." Next day he sent
off the cheque which " was the exact sum to the rupee
to pay the bill of costs." 1
At other times the prophet was bidden to do some-
thing which seemed more than rash, as when Jeremiah
was commanded to buy the field of Hanameel. 2 Miss
Carmichael says that never did she understand that
story till the day she finished paying for a field the
complicated buying of which had lasted from 1904 to
1914 the last date at which it would have been
possible to secure it. One day, long before she had had
any idea that so much land would be wanted, as she
was looking from the verandah out on "a view of a
fair field beyond, reaching, in fact, up to a village on
the north, the word came as clearly as ever I had known
it, ' Ask for that piece of land.'
" ' But, Lord, we do not want it,' and again the word
came, 'Ask.' I had never asked for an unwanted
thing, and was puzzled. . . . But there was no escape
from that strange urging as of another will than mine ;
so I asked for the field, adding though, I remember,
' But have we not enough ? ' " The field had many
owners, and about thirty transactions were needed be-
fore all the many persons who had a voice in its disposal
were satisfied, and throughout the ten years new gar-
dens were continually being taken up and walls sunk
all round it ; but no one bought a part of the plot that
Was asked for, and it was all paid for by special gifts. 3
Then there is the story of the disobedient prophet, 4
who was sent on an errand and bidden not to eat or
1 Nor Scrip, chap. 6. 2 Jer. 32.
3 Chap. 15; 4 i Kings 13.
102 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
drink till he returned from it. Both Palladius and Fox
give illustrations of this. Palladius was told by Moses
the Libyan how, when he was a young man, he with
other monks at his monastery dug a well, but after
three days' hard work, when they had got below the
usual level at which water was found, and found none,
they thought of giving up. " Then Pior appeared from
the desert . . . and said, after the greeting, ' Why
have you lost heart, men of little faith ? For I have
seen you since yesterday losing heart.' And having
descended by a ladder to the cavity of the well, he said
a prayer with them, and having taken a pick he said,
after striking the third blow : ' Oh, God of the holy
patriarchs, make not the toil of thy servants useless,
but send them the water they need.' And immediately
water sprang out so that they were wetted all over, So
he prayed once more and went off. They tried to make
him eat, but he would not suffer them, saying : ' That
for which I was sent is accomplished ; for this I was
not sent.' " l
Sometimes the prophet was simply bidden to go
somewhere, or told how to go, as Jeremiah was sent to
the Euphrates. 2 The story of Marmaduke Stevenson
quoted above gives instances of this. " So at the time
appointed," he says, " Barbadoes was set before me,
unto which I was required of the Lord to go and leave
my dear and loving wife and tender children. ... So
in obedience to the living God I made preparation to
pass to Barbadoes in the fourth month, 1658." After
he had been there some months he heard that in New
England a law had been passed to execute Quakers if
they returned after being exiled. "And as I con-
sidered the thing . . . immediately came the word of
1 Pall., p. 138. 2 Jer. 13, 1-7.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS 103
the Lord to me, saying, ' Thou kuowest not but that
thou mayest go thither.' " Then apparently he was
led to go to Rhode Island. " So after I had been there
visiting the seed which the Lord had blessed, the word
of the Lord came to me, saying, ' Go to Boston with
thy brother William Robinson,' and at His command
I was obedient." The account was written a week
before his execution at Boston. 1
A story of Stephen Grellet is told by Miss Hodgkin
in her Book of Quaker Saints, which illustrates the
story of Philip's journey to Gaza and his sermon to the
eunuch. Grellet heard the command to leave his work
and take a certain journey. When he reached the end
of it he found only a deserted lumber camp. Never-
theless he was bidden to go into the main shanty and
preach, which he did, until, having delivered his soul
of the burden laid upon him, he felt himself at liberty
to go back on his several days' journey home again. It
was not till many years later that he learnt that a man
had been hidden behind the hut, was converted by his
sermon, and became the means of converting a whole
village.
Perhaps the most remarkable account of travelling
directions is that given in Acts, 2 by which Paul was
guided to cross into Europe. But it is illustrated by
the extraordinary story of the voyage of the Woodhouse
(in 1657), carrying a party of Quakers to New England.
The Woodhouse was a small ship, and for part of the
way was convoyed by three big ships, who left them
for fear of the Dutch. " It was showed to Humphrey
Norton early in the morning that they were nigh unto
us that sought our lives ; and he called me and told
me, but said : ' Thus saith the Lord ; ye shall be
1 C. L. F. T., p. 33. 2 Acts 1 6, 6-10.
H
104 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
carried away as in a mist.' " They saw the Dutchman,
and their companions fled, " In the very interim the
Lord God fulfilled His promise and struck our enemies
in the face with a contrary wind, wonderfully to our
refreshment. Then upon our parting from these three
ships, we were brought to ask counsel of the Lord and
the word was from Him, ' Cut through and steer your
straightest course, and mind nothing but Me,' unto
which thing He much provoked us and caused us to
meet together every day. . . . Thus it was all the
voyage with the faithful, who were carried far above
storms and tempests, that when 'the ship went either
to the right hand or to the left, their hands joined all
as one and did direct her way ; so that we have seen
and said, we see the Lord leading our vessel even as it
were a man leading a horse by the head, we regarding
neither latitude nor longitude, but kept to our Line,
which was and is our Leader, Guide and Rule." When
in July, 1657, they made land, after special "drawings,"
they found themselves exactly at that part of Long
Island "where the movbgs of some Friends were
unto." 1
Stephen Grellet gives the story of another guidance
operating in a different manner. He was in Europe in
1813, on one of his missionary tours. In Genoa he
intended to go to Rome by sea via Leghorn. " As I
was going to engage my passage for that port, my mind
was introduced into unutterable distress gross dark-
ness seemed to be before me, whilst a bright stream of
light was behind ; I stood still for a while and found
I could not go forward." He went home and prayed
to God for guidance. " He gave me to see and very
strongly to feel that to Rome and Naples I should
1 c. L. F. T., p. 29-30.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS 105
indeed go, but that the time for it had not yet come,
and the language of the Spirit was to proceed with all
speed to Geneva and Switzerland." This he accord-
ingly did, and found later that the French had sent out
orders for his arrest, and if he had escaped he ran the
risk of being shut up into Italy by the retreating army
of the King of Naples, or involved in the flying armies
of Napoleon pursued by the Austrians. 1
After these more detailed accounts, Woolman's
description of the guidance which he experienced on
his journey to England is very slight. He knew of a
ship that was shortly sailing, " and feeling a draught
in my mind towards the steerage of the same ship," he
went to make inquiries. 2
Quite a different experience is indicated by the ex-
pression, "The pattern shewed thee in the mount." 3
Was a pattern really shown ? From Miss Carmichael's
account it is not impossible. She found that it was
necessary to build a schoolhouse for the growing
children. " We had not thought of anything large,
but as we pondered the matter, ' as it were the appear-
ance ' of something large was shown. Our way where
buildings are concerned is to ask for a pattern. . . .
Now, the perplexing thing in this case was that the
pattern that seemed to be shown was much too large
for our requirements. We had enough money, a special
gift, for a building framed on a smaller pattern. . . .
But it was drawn and considered, and on January 17,
1910, the estimate was made. It far passed the limits
of that gift." But on the 2oth so much money came
in that they decided to begin the work, and next month
1 Grellet, pp. 91-92. z W., p. 215.
3 Exod. 25, 40; 27, 8; Num. 8, 4; cp. Ezek. 40-48 and Rev. n,
i. 2; 21, 12-20.
io6 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
a letter dated January 17 brought 100, and gifts came
in steadily till the work was paid for. 1
Our last examples concern the power of God to hold
back those who would hurt His servants when they are
on His errands until their work is accomplished.
It has often been noted in connection with Daniel in
the den of lions that a fakir in a trance will go safely
into the jungle because wild beasts will not touch a
man in that state. But there is another kind of hold-
ing back. We have so far not been taking our Lord's
experiences into account. He is unique. But two or
three times it is recorded of Him that His enemies were
unable to do anything against Him " because His hour
had not yet come/' 2 and in Luke, 3 when the people of
Nazareth tried to kill Him, " He, passing through the
midst of them, went His way."
There are several incidents which illustrate this bind-
ing power of God's providence. It is told that during
one of the periodical faction fights to which Siena was
subject Catherine of Siena's brothers were on the losing
side, and a friend of theirs came to the house begging
them to take refuge in the church of St. Anthony,
where others had gone for safety. Catherine said :
" They shall certainly not go to St. Anthony's ! and I
am heartily sorry for those who are already there."
Then she rose up and led them straight down the street
which was occupied by their enemies, who bowed
reverently to her, and took them to a place of safety
where she told them to lie hidden for three days. After
three days the city was quiet, but all who had gone to
St. Anthony's were killed. 4
Mr. Glover tells how on their flight from the Boxers
1 Nor Scrip, 22-25. 2 ]^ n 7> 44 ' I0 39-
3 Luke 4, 30. * C. of S., pp. 97, 98.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS 107
they were pursued to the edge of a ridge which " fell
away on one side in a steep declivity to a dry torrent
bed." They were jostled and pushed as the people
tried to force them along the ridge to a little temple,
intending to stone them. At a word from their faithful
Chinese servant they turned and followed a thin goat
trail down the steep declivity. " The moment we dis-
appeared over the side, the mob simultaneously stopped
dead at the spot, as if arrested by a sudden and irre-
sistible power. The loud yells and cries of a moment
ago were stilled to silence absolute, awful silence. So
startling was it that I dared to turn and take one look.
I could scarcely believe my eyes. The mob lined the
ridge in hundreds, motionless as if spell-bound, help-
lessly watching us ... slip away from under their
very hand. Not a single soul of them attempted to
follow." 1
Later on they were arrested and taken a terrible
journey to the yamen of a mandarin by soldiers who,
while not daring to kill them themselves, were anxious
to get rid of them without involving the yamen in
possible trouble. They came to a large market-town
which they were told was very anti-foreign, and while
they rested at the inn the soldiers left them for a time,
as they afterwards found, to stir up the populace to a
massacre. They meanwhile gave themselves to prayer.
" Meantime a crowd was gathering at the courtyard
gates, which had been closed behind us, and the yelling
and battering that now ensued told its own tale. The
terrible cry, ' Kill the devils ! ' was its own confirma-
tion of the escort's warning. When at length they
called us to ' shang ch'ae,' it was significantly to repeat
the warning that there was no chance of our getting
1 1000 Miles, p. 146.
[08 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Dut of the town alive ; and in the prospect of immediate
ieath we passed out on to the street. . . . What was
it that paralysed the arm and tied the tongue of the
vast crowd that lined the way ? We saw it with our
syes the people, who but now were at the doors
yelling for us to be brought out to them, as though
turned to stone at the sight of us. Hundreds of them
(I might almost say thousands) massed on either side,
watching us pass slowly along the narrow lane they
Left for us, without speaking a word or lifting a finger
igainst us. A few lads echoed the shout that had so
lately rent the air, but there was no response of any
sort or kind." 1
Fox's Journal is full of instances. The following is
perhaps one of the most striking. In 1671, as he was
jailing to America, their ship was chased by what they
:hought was a Sallee rover. The master, saying that
" If the mariners had taken Paul's counsel they had
lot come to the damage they did," consulted him, and
" The Lord showed me that His life and power was
placed between us and the ship that pursued us."
The Sallee rover was the faster ship of the two, and
chough the Englishmen put out all their lights, "About
eleven at night the watch called and said they were
ust upon us. That disquieted some of the passengers,
whereupon I sat up in my cabin and, looking
through the porthole, the moon not being quite gone
down, I saw them very near to us. I was getting up
to go out of the cabin, but remembering the word of the
Lord, that His life and power was placed between us and
them, I lay down again. The master and some of the
seamen came again and asked me if they might not
steer such a point ? I told them they might do as
1 1000 Miles, p. 230.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME INCIDENTS 109
they would. By this time the moon was quite down,
a fresh gale arose, and the Lord hid us from them ; and
we sailed briskly on and we saw them no more. . . .
Afterwards, while we were at Barbadoes, there came in
a merchant from Sallee and told the people that one
of the Sallee men-of-war saw a monstrous yacht at sea,
the greatest that ever he saw, and had her in chase,
and was just upon her, but that there was a spirit in her
that he could not take." l
Examples might be multiplied, but enough have
been brought forward to show that whatever con-
clusion psychology may draw as to their nature, the
phenomena have been continuous from the prophets
to the present day, and that in people who, like the
prophets, have been leaders in new social and religious
developments which have stood the test of time.
The question of the inspiration of the prophets is
then not an isolated problem, but is bound up with the
experience of the servants of God for the last two
thousand years.
1 Fox, pp. 423-5.
CHAPTER X
SOME CONSIDERATIONS
IN these days, when psychology has made such strides,
it is harder than it would have been some ten years
ago for one without first-hand knowledge of either
psychology or mysticism to draw definite conclusions
from these data. We can only of er some considerations
which appear to rise out of them.
There are, as St. Theresa says, certain words which
"are deeds." They have in an unparalleled way
"found" people for the last two thousand and more
years. Originally written in Palestine, yet the present
age only shows in an increasing measure the
universality of their appeal, as they come with a force
which none of our modern productions can command,
alike to the ignorant savage or the cultured philosopher.
They change lives. They have been through the ages
recognised by those who knew God as spoken by the
same voice that spoke to them.
We are now engaged in the quest for social ameliora-
ation and reform. In these words are found by
growing consent the soundest principles of national,
political, and social life. Centuries ago prophets and
wise men taught that the root of both social and
economic righteousness lay first in the spiritual attitude
of man to God and to his neighbour ; "as a man
thinketh, so is he . " Their teaching as to what destroys
no
SOME CONSIDERATIONS in
a nation has been exemplified throughout history, and
not least in our own time. These men were not only
ahead of their own age, they are still ahead of ours.
They laid the foundation of the building Christ came to
complete. It fitted. He had not to destroy but to
fulfil. Looking back, we can see that they were
working to a plan ; but they were looking forward.
Whence had these men these things ?
We have seen that their experiences, though larger
in scope, appear to be of the same nature as those of
others throughout the Christian era, which are also
ascribed to the direct communication of God the
Creator with man made in His image . Are these claims
valid, or are they to be accounted for in terms of
sublimation of instincts, emotions, complexes, and
suggestions ?
Any mental processes must of course come within
the scope of psychology, but can these be reduced to
merely mental processes without vitiating the evidence,
even as did materialism by trying to reduce mental
processes to terms of the material in which they
worked ? As the mind uses the body for its purposes,
so the spirit uses the mind, but neither is to be limited
to, or identified with, the instrument it uses, nor to be
explained in terms of the instrument alone.
If mankind were in a cul-de-sac with no further
development to look forward to, such an explanation
might be necessary. But if man is on a thoroughfare,
if " the true Divine order is ever ready to break through
into the world, if men will only suffer it to break into
their hearts," if man's true development depends on
his response to a Divine environment, more is necessary
to account for experiences which, as we have seen, are
so widespread. If evolution is a progress from one
ii2 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
state of being, it is also a progress towards another,
and if man retains vestiges of his past is he to be
denied embryonic indications of his future, powers not
yet fully developed of spiritual hearing and sight by
means of which in trusted hands the race is to be
guided in the direction of the goal to which it is bound ?
If that is so, we may think of man as living in a tent
with two doors. If we credit one party, he can only
open his back door and look back on the way by which
he has come, to the rock from whence he was hewn,
and the hole of the pit from which he was digged.
On the other view, he can also open his front door, and
look forward to the home to which he goes, and hear
the words of those who dwell there. For most of us the
door is very stiff. The saints and prophets are those
who have succeeded in opening it a little wider than
the rest of us.
One more consideration. If we can accept the
evidence of the prophets and saints, who, whatever
their gifts, were still sinful and imperfect men and
women, that they did, in spite of all, know and hold
communion with God and with Christ, and hear the
commands of the Holy Spirit what light does it
throw upon the human consciousness of Christ ?
Would it not appear that whatever degree of kenosis we
accept, yet for Him, as the Perfect, Sinless Man, Man
as he is meant to be when full grown, there would be
none of the barriers to perfect communion with the
Father which are imposed by our sinfulness and
imperfect development? Would there be any limit
to the revelations which the Perfect Man could as
MAN receive from His Father except the unknown
limits of the capacity of the perfect human nature to
register them ?
NOTE ON THE
QUARTER SHEKEL OF SAUL'S SERVANT
i SAMUEL 9
M
[ANY conclusions as to the status of Samuel have
been drawn from the suggestion of Saul's servant
that the quarter shekel he had in his pocket would be an
adequate gift in connection with the inquiry about the
lost asses. For example, Professor T. R. Robinson,
in his Prophecy and the Prophets, which was unfortunately
not published in time to be used more extensively in this
essay, says : " A fee is usually required . . . this implies
that the Seer is master of his own powers and can work to
order " (p. 29).
The following note from a book written by one who some
seventy years ago lived for a considerable time in the Holy
Land is illuminating :
" Then as now, in the East, it would have been the
height of rudeness and indecorum for anyone to present
himself before a superior or equal, especially if he had a
request to make, without some present, more or less,
according to his degree, not by any means as a fee or
bribe, but in testimony of his homage, his respect, or his
compliments." Plutarch records of the Persian King
Artaxerxes Mnemon that he " always received with
satisfaction the smallest and most trifling gifts which
evinced the zeal and attention of the offerers ; and in a
country where we have ourselves bought six of the finest
pomegranates for a penny, he evinced the utmost pleasure
on receiving from a man named Romises the finest
pomegranate his garden yielded. A present equally
small would have enabled Saul to pay his respects to
"3
ii4 PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Samuel ; but it was as impossible for him to appear empty-
handed, as it would be for us to enter a gentleman's
parlour with covered heads. He lamented that . . . there
was not a morsel left of the bread they had taken with them,
clearly intimating that one of the small cakes or loaves
into which Eastern bread is made, would in his view have
been a suitable offering. The servant informed him,
however, that he had sixpence in his pocket, which could be
applied to this purpose. . . . With us, to offer a small sum
of money to a superior or a public man, or even to an
equal, would be a gross affront. ... All this is different in
the East, where a small coin is not less acceptable as a mark
of respectful attention, than its value in any other shape."
Dr. Kitto. Daily Bible Illustrations, 30th week, 5th day.
(Oliphant, 1853.)
INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
Page
Page
Page
Gen. 12. i - - 32
Josh. 5. 13-15 - 33
?ss. 106. 23, 30 - 92
13. 14 - -32
Judg. 4. 9 - - 79
?rov. 29. 1 8 - - 60
15-1 - - 31
6. 11-23 - 33
'.sa. 2, i - - 92
15- 17 - - 31
13- - - - 33
6. - . - 45, 63
16. 7 - - 32
i Sam. 3. 4-21 33, 34,
8. 16-17 ' 53
17. 1-22 31,32
44
8. 19 - - 23
18. 1-35 - 31
9. 9 - - 66
16. 9-1 1 - 54
19. - - - 32
9. 15 - 64, 66
20. 9 54> 79, 97
20. 36 - - 67
9. 15-10.9 15,79
21. 1-4 - - 54
21. 17-19 32, 35
10. 5-13 - 20
21. 6-12 - 16
22. I - - 32
19. 20-24 20
22. 4-5 - - 54
22. II-l8 - 31
28. 6 - - 67
22. 14 - - 64
26. 2, 24 - 32
2 Sam. 7. 4-17 - 63
22. 15-25 - 79
28. 10-22 32, 67
24.11 - - 66
28. 7 - 16, 67
31-3 - - 32
24- 17 - - 33
29.9-12 1 6, 66
31. 24 - 32, 67
i Kgs. 11.26-39 3,79
37. and 38. - 79
32. I - - 32
12. 22-24 - 3
40. 22-27 - 4
32. 24-29 - 32
13- - 3. I01
43. 10 - - 80
35-i - - 32
14. 5-14 15, 65,
46. 9-13 - 4
41. 25 - - 67
79,83
50. 4-5 - - 65
Exod. 3. 32, 34, 44, 51
16. i-io - 4
53- - - - 92
4. 12 - - 61
17. i - - 43
Jer. 1.6-7- - 5 1
19. 16-20 32, 44
17. 2, 8 - - 98
i-9 - 45.65
24. 10-11 32, 44
18. i - - 98
i. 11-13 - 67
25. 40 - - 105
18. 26-29 - 23
4. 19-22 - 54
27. 8 - - 105
19- 5-i8 34. 45
5. i - - 92
33- i7- 2 3 33. 44
20. - - - 3
8. 10 - - 16
34-6 - - 33
21. 1-7 - - 3
13. 1-7 - - 102
Num. 8. 4 - - 105
22. - - 4, 23
14. 13-16 17, 19
12. 5-9 - 8, 32
2 Kgs. 2.11 - - 34
15. 15-18 - 54
22.9,20,31 - 32
3-15 - - 22
18. 1-12 91,98
22.18,38 25,35
5. 25-26 15, 84
20. 1-6 - - 80
23. 16 - - 32
6, 8-32 - 15, 35,
20. 9 - - 54
24. i - - 25
84
23. 9-40 17, 19,
Deut. 4. 10-13 - 3 2
6.33-7.20 - 79
24,31,56
13. 1-3 - 10, 78
8. ii - - 84
24, i - - 67
18. 18 - - 61
9- - - - 3
27. - - - 97
18. 20-22 10, 77,
20. 1-5 - 19, 64
28. - - i, 52
78
22. 14-20 - 3
28. 15-17 - 79
34. 10 - - 32
iChr, 21. 16-21 - 33
29. 10 - - 80
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
Page
Page
Page
Jer. 30. - -
- 80
Amos 7. 1-8. i
- 6 7
Acts 5. 1-9 -
- 8 3
32. - -
80, ioi
7- 15 19,
45, 65.
7- 55 -
- 6 7
36. 16 -
- 3
98
9- i-9 -
19, 33.
38.21 -
93
7- 17 -
- 79
34.45
42.
52
8.2,3 -
- 67
10.3 -
33,35
43- 10 -
- 80
Micah i.i
- 92
10. 10 -
35,68
Lam. 2. 14 -
i?
3-5-8 -
- 16
10. 5-20
- 98
4- 13-14
17
Hab. 2. 1-3 -
16, 93
12. 9
- 35
Ezek. i. 4-28
33, 34.
Zeph. i. 17-18
5
16. 9
- 63
45
3- 11-13
- 50
16. 6-io
- 103
2. 2
- 66
Zech. i. 8 -
- 63
18. 9 -
- 63
2. 6, 7 -
5i
4.1
34
19. 13-16
10,78
3. 8-1 1 -
- 5i
Matt. i. 20 -
- 3i
21. 10 -
- 97
3- I4- 22
16, 33,
2.12,13,19- 31
22. 9
34
54,56
10. 19 -
- 61
22. 17
- 68
3- 24 -
- 66
ii. 3 -
- 98
23. II -
63,7
3. 26-27
- 53
Mark 2. 9-12 -
10, 78
27. 23 -
63, 70
4- 1-5- 17
97
7- i-i3 -
10, 78
I Cor. 2, 14 -
- i7
8. i
- 56
7. 9 -
- 18
2. 11-15
17.75
12. I-I3
- 97
9- 38, 39
10
7. IO, 12
- 52
. 13- 3
19
27-33
- 29
7-25 '
- 8
13- 1-23
17
Luke i. -2. -
3i
9. 16
54
13. 6, 16
" 53
4- 3
- 106
12, IO -
- 83
13- 17
23
9- 32 -
- 33
14. 32 -
2 5> 53
22. 30, 31
- 92
24. 16,31
- 35
15.8 -
- 45
24. 27 -
- '53
John i. 42-47
- 83
2 Cor. 12. 1-4
- 89
29. 21 -
- 53
2. 4
- 5 2
Gal. i. ii, 12
7
33- 2-9 -
16, 54
2. 24-25
- 83
Phil. i. 23-24
- - 72
33- 21-22
- 53
3- 2
10
i Peter i. 10-12
- 76
37- i -
56
5-36 -
- 10
i John i. 5 -
- 46
40. i
56
7- 6, 8 -
- 52
4- i
- 83
40.-48. -
- 105
7-44 -
106
4- 2, 3
- IO
Dan. 8. 10 -
34
8. 43, 47
- 75
Rev. i. 10
- 67
8. 18 -
- 66
9- 39-4 1
- 75
ii. i
- 105
10. 9-10
- 34
10. 39 -
- 106
21. I2-2O
- 105
10. 7-10, 1 8 - 66
12. 29 -
- 35
Amos i. i
54.92
Acts 4. 13 -
- 88
INDEX OF SUBJECTS AND AUTHORITIES
Anthony, St., 84
Apostles, 45, 97
Archbishops' Report, 20, 22
Auditions, 18, 27-28, 30-38, 39
exterior, 31-42
interior, 47, 60-66
Augustine, 36
Barnes, Canon, 8
Behmen, 55
Bible, 18, no
Bunyan, 19, 37, 74
burden, 24, 51, 56-58
Carmichael, A. W., 19, 100-101,
105
Catherine of Siena, 41-42, 46-47,
71, 85, 106
Christ, 10, 78, 106, in, 112
clairaudience, 14-15
clairvoyance, 14-15
Cloud of Unknowing, n, 12, 24,
30, 60, 68
deliverances, 106-109
devil, ii, 17, 24, 70
Didymus, 81
dissociation, 7, 29
dreams, 31, 67, 68
ecstasy, 87, 90
Finney, 22, 38, 48-49, 61
Fox, ii, 12, 55, 56-57, 62, 72,
82-83, 85, 90, 108-109
Franciscans, 21
Glover, A., 18-19, 39. 64, 106-108
Grellet, 47, 57, 103, 104
Grubb, Sarah, 55-56
Havergal, F. R., 93-94
Holmes, 13, 1 8
Hudson, 7
Hudson Taylor, n, 37-38, 99-
100
insight, 83-84, 85
inspiration, theories of, 5-7, 28
James, Prof., 46
John of Lycopolis, 81, 84
journeys, guidance on, 103, 104
Julian of Norwich, 27, 68, 75,
. 94-95
Kerm, 40, 74, 93
locutions (see Auditions)
Luke, St., 35, 68
Messianic hope, 30, 80
Moses, 44
music, 20-22, 91-94
Nicholas of Basle, 62
oracle (see burden)
Palladius, 81, 84, 102
" pattern shewed," 105-106
photisms, 46
Pior, 102
Pratt, 7, 21, 28, 29, 95
prediction, 4, 30, 76, 78, So
Prophet, 25, 66
authority, 3
discipline, 16-17, 43 5
false, 19, 23, 51
gilds, 20
on history, 91-92
language, 60, 76, 94
obligation, 51, 54-56, 97
originality, 17
signs, 78-86, 97
silence, 43, 51, 53
on social questions, 4, 75, 77,
IIO-III
Radstock, Lord, 98-99
rapture, 89
revivals, 20, 22-23
Sadhu, 13, 14. 49, 61, 69, 74, 76,
89
Skinner, 8, 16, 69
spiritualism, 5, 8
Stevenson, Marmaduke, 65, 102-
103
117
n8
SUBJECTS AND AUTHORITIES
subconsciousness, 5-7
suggestion,. 5
suggestion, auto , 17, 30, 58, 61
Suso, 36, 62, 71
Tauler, 22
Tests of revelation, 10, 18
Theresa, St., n, 13, 17, 19, 61,
87, no
Foundations, 70, 71
Interior Castle, n, 12, 19, 24,
26, 27, 29-30, 46, 70, 75,
88, 89, 91, 94
Life, 61, 70, 80, 88
Thouless, 22
Tongues Movement, 25, 26
unconscious mind (see subcon-
sciousness)
Underbill, E., 25, 92
Vision
at beginning of career, 31, 44-
, 46, 48-49, 65
exterior, 32-35, 41-42, 44
hindrances to, 16-17, 5
imaginary, 70, 87
intellectual, 70, 87-88, 89, 94,
96
interior, 66-67, 7~75
symbolic, 68-70, 73
watchman, 4, 16
Wesley, 22
Woodhbuse, voyage of, 103-104
Woolman, 50, 52-54, 55, 57-58,
63; 72-73. 86, 105
^i r af
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