PROPHECY A PROOF OF INSPIRATION.
By H. L. Hastings
H. L. Hastings, in “Inspiration of the Bible.” THE Bible, to my mind, bears the marks of divine inspiration in the foresight which it exhibits. This book foretells things. You cannot do that. You cannot tell what will be next year, or next week. “The spirits” cannot tell who will be the next president, or governor, or emperor. They may tell a great many things which are past. They may tell you who your grandmother was, and may copy the inscription on your grandfather’s gravestone, and may tell things which are written in the family record. They may reveal many things in the past,—for the devil knows about the past,—but they cannot foretell the future. I did hear of one spiritual medium who foretold her own death, and she died within a few hours; but when they got the stomach-pump, they pumped poison enough out of her to kill two or three. That kind of prophecy requires no omniscient foresight. Years ago I talked with an infidel in Plymouth, Mass., and he wanted me to give him some evidence that the Bible is true. After some conversation, I loaned him a little volume, an abridgment of “Keith on Prophecy.” Some ten years after, as I took my seat in a railway train, he sat down beside me and began to talk. He said: “If you want that book, you can have it; but no one else can have it at any price.” It had knocked his infidelity into atoms, and he had become a believer in Christ, and a member of the Church. The revelations of prophecy are facts which exhibit the divine omniscience. So long as Babylon is in heaps; so long as Nineveh lies empty, void, and waste; so long as Egypt is the basest of kingdoms; so long as Tyre is a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea; so long as Israel is scattered among all nations; so long as Jerusalem is trodden under foot of the Gentiles; so long as the great empires of the world march on in their predicted course,—so long we have proof that one omniscient Mind dictated the predictions of that book, and “prophecy came not in old time by the will of man.”