The Inspiration of the Prophets.
ST. PETER says: The prophets inquired and searched diligently, “searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ, which was in them, did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.” It is certain, therefore, the prophets had not perfect knowledge, from the gift of prophecy, of the full import of the great truths they uttered; but it is also certain they were not mere automatons, who conveyed the truth to us, as the pipes convey the water to our dwellings, without partaking of it themselves. They were holy men of God, divinely conscious of the extraordinary gift, with which they were peculiarly favored of Heaven, and by which they overleaped the darkness of centuries, and spoke of events in the future as though they were present; and the proof of their inspiration is seen in the exact, literal fulfillment of their words. This certainly could not have happened by mere accident or chance. To suppose the ravings of hypocrites, fanatics, madmen, or fools, could fortuitously meet with a literal and exact fulfillment after the lapse of many centuries and on the grandest scale, and among various nations, and to be fulfilling before our eyes, after thousands of years, requires far greater credulity than to believe in the inspiration of the prophets. God has made us rational, as well as sentient and conscious, beings, and does not require us to believe without evidence sufficient to justify and command our belief. As in nature, so also in revelation, there are evidences, clear, distinct, and irrefragable, of wonderful intelligence and vast design. Prophecy is the matrix or die, and the truth is the fact which comes from it; for the one perfectly corresponds to the other. Any one looking at the mold or die, and then at the coin which came from it, could not be in doubt, or hesitate to say, with absolute certainty, This coin came from that die; and if he were to examine with microscopical accuracy, he would find confirmation of his belief. The faces of a fractured rock, with their depressions, facets, angles, and veins, perfectly correspond, in every minute particular, to each other, and that any other piece of broken rock should do so, is beyond the bounds of possibility or belief. And do not the facts of prophecy answer as truly to the utterances of prophecy as the coin does to the die, or one face of the fractured rock to the other? And have we not in prophecy certainly uttered in the early ages, and as certainly fulfilled literally after thousands of years, not merely in one, but in many, instances, and not in obscure and doubtful cases, but in certain vast and well-known facts, the most conclusive and satisfactory evidence the mind of man can desire or have, that holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost? Truth, like the seeds of the earth, requires time for its maturity. The future to man is the present to God, who, in the grandeur of his eternity, sweeps the bounds of all time, and speaks of things that are not, as though they were. The truth of prophecy has been amply proved in the history of the past; and the researches of science present it with accumulated evidence in the present, and as science has been the handmaid of religion in the past, we cannot doubt she will prove the faithful auxiliary of revelation in the future. The Jews are a living and everywhere present demonstration of the truth of prophecy. They have an imperishable name, but they have no nationality; and yet they are found among all nations. They are the masters of all languages, and the controllers of a large part of the circulating medium of the world. For more than eighteen hundred years they have been known, acknowledged, and persecuted, as the descendants of an ancient race, whose ancestors lived before the pyramids of Egypt, and who probably helped to build them, and who were then, as their descendants are now, diverse from other people. Other nations, far greater than they ever were, have been lost, merged, swallowed up in the vortex of nations; but the Jew has ever preserved his individuality and identity amid all revolutions and changes, and is as truly a Jew at this time as his ancestor was at the time of the dispersion; and this was distinctly foretold. Their Sacred Books they have guarded with the utmost fidelity, and these books contain prophecies which have been fulfilling through the whole course of time. The 26th chapter of Leviticus contains a daguerreotyped picture of their infidelities and sufferings, written more than three thousand years ago, and every line and word of it their history proves to be true.—Methodist Home Journal.