by that instinct, while it strengthens it in turn. Now the prophets claim inspiration; they profess their conviction that God is personally speaking through them. They exhibit the natural human concomitants of such a condition. They shrink back, they are abashed, they despond, they fly, they agonize at the greatness of their fate. And yet when they speak, they speak with the serene authority of certitude. They are disinterested ; they have nothing to gain and all to lose by their vocation. They are sane; there is no morbid phrensy or fanatical excitement about them. They proclaim a truth which they are sure by its very nature must prevail. And in fact it has prevailed. This is their great, their world-wide, their undeniable fulfilment. And the significance of it cannot, for our purpose, be more decisively expressed than by quoting its most uncompromising critic. 'What,' asks Professor Kuenen, 'did the Israelitish prophets accomplish? What was the result of their work, and what value are we to assign to it?

Ethical monotheism is their creation. They have themselves ascended to the belief in one, only, holy, and righteous God, who realizes His will, or moral good, in the world, and they have, by preaching and writing, made that belief the inalienable property of our race 1.'

Prophets of Israel.

What then are we to think of the psychological phenomenon which these men present? An opponent who, in the face of all the other lines of evidence, still disbelieves in a personal God, may perhaps not find much additional difficulty in regarding the prophets as deluded; though by so doing he will be landed in the awkward position, to which we have already had occasion to refer, of attributing a predominant factor in human progress, and by implication human progress itself, to a delusion. But, on the other hand, if we approach the prophets with the opposite presumption, we cannot but feel that they confirm our belief. They claim inspiration; it is a claim which, as we have seen, the majority of mankind has never thought unnatural. They claim an experience which, if true, is by that very fact above and beyond the power of any other men to analyse. And in virtue of this claim they have accomplished in the world, precisely what they professed themselves commissioned to accomplish. The simplest hypothesis about them is that they spoke the truth, and are a crowning evidence of God's personal intercourse with men.

But the significance of the prophets does not end here. The Old Testament, the prophetic book, remains; and when we speak of its inspiration, we do not merely mean that it was once inspired, but that it is still inspired as a present, an everpresent fact, which admits of experimental verification to-day. As there is a vague apprehension in many minds that modern criticism, in questioning our traditional views of the Bible, may invalidate its claim to inspiration, it is necessary that we should distinguish clearly between criticism and spiritual interpretation. Literary criticism-using the phrase in its most comprehensive sense ;literary criticism is a science, and its object is to find out facts; as for example, when, where and by whom a book was written; what precise words its author used, and what precise meaning he intended to convey. Its problems are complex; its methods subtle and somewhat subjective; many of its conclusions, at present, tentative. But it is a perfectly legitimate science, with a profoundly important end in view; and ought no more to be discredited than any other science, by the fact that its various exponents are not all equally wise, nor always in mutual accord. This science investigates the Bible, as it investigates the Avesta or the Vedas, and is as supreme within its province as it is impotent beyond. But inspiration is a phenomenon wholly and entirely beyond its province; a spiritual voice which can only be heard by the spiritual ear. The words and events of the Bible are its material medium of expression, its human organ of utterance; but when none are listening, they resemble a silent instrument of music, which may be handled, examined, criticized, classified, explained without thought of its latent power to stir the soul. Thus criticism and inspiration do not move in the same plane, and can never meet or interfere with one another, and the notion that they do so is due to a confusion of thought, from which the more polemical partisans of neither are quite free. In one case, indeed, this mistake may command our sympathy, though not our approval; in the case of the really religious man, who has come to associate spiritual truth with the particular form of thought, or words, in which it has habitually come home to himself, and sensitively shrinks from any severance of the two, as from the disruption of his very soul. Yet, however natural, this is a weakness, and a weakness in whose conquest the essence of spiritual progress oftentimes consists. Meanwhile, the existence of such men is a cloke for the far larger and less earnest class, whose religion consists in holding fast the form of sound words without its substance; the religious materialists of all time, who, knowing nothing of the interior life of the spirit, imagine that in grasping its externals they grasp all; and are proportionably alarmed at the very notion of examining what, with only too sure an instinct, they call the grounds of their belief. These men in turn play into the hands of the open opponents of all inspiration, by so intimately amalgamating the letter and the spirit that every criticism of the one shall seem a disparagement of the other, and thus enabling the results-the legitimate results of critical science-to be adroitly and plausibly misused for an illegitimate end.

The result of this misapplication of criticism on the one side, and of the nervous alarm which at once dreads it and yet contributes to cause it on the other, is to obscure the unassailable strength of the primary evidence for inspiration. For the highest evidence is self-evidence, which is independent of proof or demonstration from without. In the case of those abstract truths, like the mathematical axioms, which we intuitively recognize as soon as they are stated, this is obvious. But it holds equally good of concrete truths, or facts, of immediate experience. Our belief in the reality of an object, which we see before our eyes, can neither be diminished nor increased by argument. Our perception of beauty cannot be heightened by analysis, or qualified by explanation. Our conviction of an intimate friend's goodness is wholly independent of what other men may say of him in praise or blame. And it is upon such evidence that our belief in inspiration ultimately rests. Tradition may teach it, or criticism commend it, or authority command it; but experience, personal experience, can alone assure us of its truth. Such experience may take various forms, and pass through various degrees. We may begin by being