whether of Baal or of Yahweh. Parallels are at hand among all nations and in all ages, even down to the present. Such phenomena are to us so far from being proofs of the reality of God and spiritual things, that they sometimes tempt one to wonder whether all other supposed evidences of contact with the Other-than-ourselves may not like them be self-induced delusions. The apocalypses certainly do not help us to lay such ghosts of doubt. Many reasons combine to warn us that the visions of these seers are not real sights of the unseen universe, nor real liftings of the veil that hides the future. The element of falsity in the assumption of the character of a great man of the past puts us on our guard; and the character and varied contents of the visions themselves make the assumption of their objectivity impossible. This does not mean that the earliest bands of prophets were not often really beside themselves, nor that the apocalyptic seers may not sometimes really have experienced the trance conditions which they coveted and sought to induce by fastings and by mental concentration and eager expectation. We get the impression, however, that vision has become a literary form among writers of this sort, and it is seldom that we are led to assume that the vision is real in this psychological sense. Perhaps the most convincing instances are such as Daniel 10: 1-9, and II Esdras 5:14-22, 9:23-28, etc.

In part corresponding to these three stages and kinds of prophets are three sorts of records which we have of them. About prophets of the first kind we have only popular traditions, stories embodied in the historical books, which enable us to understand what other people thought about the prophets rather than what the prophets thought about themselves. The tendency in these stories is toward an exaggeration of the peculiarity of the prophet and of his miraculous powers. Even so strong and great a character as Elijah is lowered in the very effort of story to exalt him,

and tends to become a mere miracle-worker. Fortunately the memory of his personality restrains this effort in some measure; yet it is quite impossible to unravel the strands of the narrative and recover the original facts of his prophetic experiences, and his own understanding of the nature of his relations with God. Of course the ordinary prophets would have shared the popular view of their calling, and sometimes sincerely, sometimes in pretense, would have cultivated ecstatic conditions and undertaken miracle and prediction. The records we have give the distinct impression that most of them were physically and psychically different from other men, but ethically and intellectually quite on the average level. And this judgment, as we shall see, is confirmed by the criticism passed upon them by the great prophets who follow.

These great prophets are often called writing prophets, although they speak first and only write afterwards, or are written about by their disciples. We cannot accept the books that now bear their names as directly the work of their pens. The analysis of these books and the recovery of the original oracles of these men is so difficult that the doubt is not unnatural whether even in their cases we can get into immediate contact with their minds. But the results of historical and literary study are most reassuring. In spite of differences in detail, agreement in all essentials has been reached, and the personalities of Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, now stand out with wonderful distinctness and impressiveness. It is most instructive to compare the Isaiah of II Kings with the Isaiah of the undoubtedly original oracles contained in the book that has his name. We should know some of the great events of Isaiah's life if we had only the stories of Kings, but Isaiah himself, all that was most characteristic in his religious experience and faith, and that which he contributed to the spiritual progress of the race, would be wholly unknown. It is not

always the writers by profession whom we know best. We know Isaiah, although his book is composite and analysis is difficult, far better than we know the author of Isaiah 40-66, even if we accept these chapters as a unity and as directly from their author's hand. We know Paul so well because he is more than a writer, in fact, only incidentally a writer, his letters being part of his missionary activity. We know Jesus himself as a living personality far better than we know the writer of Hebrews or even the author of the Johannine literature, although we have Jesus' words only in translation, and in varying forms in the different gospels.

The prophets of the third sort were writers only. We have their books on the whole as they put them forth. And yet, there is almost as thick a veil between the records and the facts in their cases as in those of the first order of prophets who did not write at all, but were written about in popular legend. We need almost as much caution in the use of the book of Enoch or the apocalypses of Ezra or Baruch as in the stories of Samuel and Kings when we are seeking the actual facts of prophetic experience. Vision has become for the writers of the apocalypses a convention, a literary device shaped in form and determined in contents by traditions, written or oral. It happens, therefore, not by accident that we know the prophets of the second kind better even than those of the last period. They stand out distinctly because they spoke in public and on public matters, because they were great actors in great crises of the nation's life, because their words even when written have the character of spoken words, the immediateness and sincerity and self-revealing quality which words artfully put together in the study, and especially words written in an assumed character and in a professional spirit, could not have.

Of course our better knowledge of the prophets of the

second kind is really due to the fact that they were far greater men than those who preceded and those who followed them in Israel. This is the reason why they occupy a greater place in the history of their nation and why the account of their religious experiences is truer to fact and fuller in meaning. The work they did, the purposes they had, the truths they saw and spoke, have an importance that itself guards the genuineness of the utterance and of its record. It is no mere accident, even though it does not always happen, that we have in these cases the best records of the greatest men, the best knowledge of the experiences that are best worth knowing.

It is already evident how different will be the problems and the results of the psychological study of the mystical experiences of prophets of these three kinds. In the crude prophecy of Saul's time and of the period of the early kings we have men acting in ways that seem to others superhuman, and no doubt meant in most cases to themselves their actual possession by superhuman spirits. But this sort of religious frenzy or madness gives the least difficulty to the psychologist and is most easily accounted for. It is the operation of factors in our mental and emotional experience with which we are familiar, abnormal but not supernormal functionings of the mind, below rather than above the common levels of human experience. In these cases to explain is to explain away, to understand is to be free from the desire and therefore to lose the capacity to have such experiences. When men are convinced that these experiences are manifestations of weaknesses of the human, rather than powers of the divine, and that they have no validity as proof of the reality of the higher realm of being, and are of no effect in opening avenues for the incoming of higher powers into human life, then they are no longer experienced. The miracle stories that are told in these early prophets fall away of themselves when science removes the

mystery and disproves the magic which ignorant hopes and fears created. In all this inevitable and welcome process of liberation from superstition we recognize already a very close relationship between the question of cause and the question of value. What these fanatics did and said in their frenzies, and what their later and even present ignorant imitators do and say, is without value; it calls forth no wonder in us and reveals nothing about the nature of that unseen world toward which our spirits aspire, to know and to experience which is the aim of religion.

But the third type of prophecy has a curious likeness to the first in this matter of value and truth. The apocalyptic writers uniformly claim to tell of things beyond human sight, things seen and heard and imparted only by the exceptional seer to whom such transports are granted. The modern student does not question first the genuineness of the transports, but first the truth and value of the things seen and heard. The value is, no doubt, greater than that of the physical excitement of early bands of raving dervishes, but it is not so great as it claims to be. What these visions actually contain is not information of a sort that convinces us, or that is difficult to account for as a wholly human product. The imagery used in descriptions of heaven, the throne of God, angels, the coming day of the Lord, the end of the world, and the world to come, we can in part trace to its sources in ancient literature, in primitive myth, in natural phenomena, especially those of the visible heavens, in catastrophies and disasters, wars and exiles, the doings of cruel and ambitious tyrants, and the shiftings of world-empire. Some great ideas, especially such as may deserve to be called a philosophy of history, or rather, the doctrine of an all-determining plan of God, we may find in these books, and some worthy discussions of the great problems of sin and evil; but of an actual seeing of realms and beings beyond our sense we find nothing, nor any justification of the claim