In spite of all the efforts of a long lifetime, the Emperor was obliged to see his country in danger of a fearful break-up from internal struggles, or from outward enemies, or from both. Six hundred and forty-one years have passed since first a Hapsburg became an Emperor, but the Hapsburgs have lived on the theory of holding fast to what has been. They have attempted the impossible task of governing fifty millions of people through the decisions of an aristocratic fraction out of the twelve million Germans, supplemented by a

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smaller fraction out of ten million Magyars. He would be a bold prophet who would guarantee six years more to that mighty and honorable imperial line. For the Germans in the Hapsburg Empire there is always a refuge in the German Empire, but can they carry with them into their haven the Bohemians, or Alpine Slavs, or Poles, to say nothing of the Hungarians? Nothing is more certain than that the Hapsburg power, system, influence, and dynasty are in fearful danger of extinction.

There

E have books on "How to Tell the Wild Flowers and books on "How to Tell the Birds," and some one has written a book almost as useful and quite as funny as either, on "How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers." is a way to tell them apart, and for a small sum you can learn it. There are certain accepted tests of certain forms of dealing and conduct. If your merchant's yardstick is under suspicion, there is somewhere an official yardstick with which it can be compared. There is somewhere (and would he were more nearly ubiquitous!) a man who can tell the coal dealer how many pounds make a ton.

If your

watch does not keep good time, there is somewhere an official register of time, at Washington or Greenwich or somewhere. If the soil of your garden is not as productive as you think it ought to be, the State chemist will tell you for the asking what you ought to add to it in the way of chemical fertilization.

But who can help us to tell the true prophets from those who are not true? Job complained that it was easier to get information about anything else than truth, and that was some time ago. How can one find out which are the true prophets?

As for the Old Testament prophets, the decision has been made for us. There they are, in the back end of the Old Testament, selected beyond our hope or fear of change. But how can we know who are true prophets now, and how did any one discover then who were true and who were false prophets?

It is a question of some historical interest,

but that is not our present concern. We should like to find, if we can, how to tell the prophets !

It.is rather appalling to discover that in Old Testament times the number of prophets whose testimony has stood the tests of time were rather small in proportion to the whole number of that company. Naturally only a few of the prophets preserved their writings to posterity. It does not follow that all the rest were false prophets. Elijah and Elisha committed nothing to writing, but they are immortal, nevertheless. Moses who wrote and Elijah who did not write stood together beside the glorified Jesus in his transfiguration.

The number of prophets was large. We have four whom we cail major and twelve whom we call minor prophets. The distinc. tion refers wholly to the length of their respective books; it has nothing to do either with their chronological sequence or spiritual importance. These sixteen, more or less, were, as we know, a small part of the number of men who spoke in the name of Jehovah and were called prophets.

What about the others? Were they good men or bad? They were not necessarily bad because they wrote nothing, or because what they wrote was not preserved. If a man were to visit a library in Europe about a century from now and find a volume of sermons by Henry Ward Beecher and one by T. De Witt Talmage and one by Phillips Brooks, it would not be safe to infer that, these were the only three American preachers of the

nineteenth century who spoke wisely or truly. The reasons why these three emerged might all be good reasons, but reasons which cast no reflection upon the great body of preachers, many thousands in number, whose sermons were unknown in Berlin a hundred years after they were dead.

Let us hope and believe that the great body of those men who spoke for God in the days of the Hebrews believed themselves to have been speaking truthfully. Let us believe that in the ordinary situations in which men came to them for spiritual help (and they covered a very wide range, as any one may discover who will read his Bible), these prophets did their duty according to their lights, and brought spiritual help to their people. We need not despise them for locating lost live stock-Samuel did that; nor suppose that their people were hopelessly insincere or mercenary because they used their religion in commonplace situations. Let us not condemn the unknown prophets because their sermons were not preserved to posterity. Few of us preachers will be able to meet that test. If they served their own day and generation, they did well.

66 To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfill;

Oh, may it all my powers engage

To do my Master's will!"

But there were false prophets. When we find a true prophet standing with his back to the wall, contending for truth against tradition, we find a dozen false prophets opposing him. It is rather disconcerting to have these men emerge from the shadow just to discover how large was their apparent majority.

The majority may be more apparent than real. There may have been many of these men who were capable of helping their people in ordinary experiences who were quite unequal to the tempestuous situations in which Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Hosea and Amos were placed. Let us be as charitable as we may.

tion of their sincerity; to their own Master they have long since rendered account. Let us believe if we can, and for myself I do, that most of them had a measure of sincerity; that the conscious frauds among them were few. But that is not the question.

Here is the question that is worth while for us to answer: How could the people of that time know who were the true prophets?

There is a ready answer, and that is this: "The true prophets wrought miracles to attest their message."

Did they?

What miracles did Jeremiah work?

Please give us a list of the miracles of Isaiah.

What do you recall of the miracles of Ezekiel ?

uses.

Elijah and Elisha wrought a few miracles each, but not to attest any message which they wrote for us, for they wrote nothing, so far as we know. Their miracles had other Hosea, Joel, Amos, Micah, and so on. to Malachi, wrought no miracles, or if they wrought any it was not to attest the truth of their message. They stood with their naked message appealing to the naked conscience of their hearers.

"Believe and venture; as for pledges,
The gods give none.'

But what about Jonah ?

Do you recall any miracle wrought by Jonah? Jonah did not transport his whale by express into Nineveh, and give exhibitions twice a day. Whatever that experience meant, it meant to him. It had no meaning to the Ninevites. In his recorded sermon in Nineveh he made no mention of it. He preached straight to the conscience. Jesus did not condemn the men of his generation in advance for the fact that he foreknew that they would not believe that he was to rise from the dead. He blamed them because they did not repent at his word, as Nineveh repented at the unattested preaching of Jonah.

How about Moses at the Court of Pharaoh ? The magicians did the same with their enchantments; and Daniel at the Court of Babylon had to meet the astrologers on their own ground. A few times in history God has done that-met the hosts of necromancy on their own level. But for the most part the cry of the prophet is against those who go to wizards that peep and mutter, and a call to the law and the testimony. "If they will

not heed these," cries the prophet Isaiah, "they are those for whom there is no dawn."

The supernatural was the last refuge of every charlatan and fraud. The true prophets, for the most part, did not meddle with it. They cried "Thus saith the Lord" by reason of the faith that gave substance to the things hoped for, and brought its own evidence of things unseen.

No, that is too cheap and easy an answer. But, then, are we not to test their reliability by the certainty with which their predictions came through?

They dealt very little in predictions. Prediction was a very minor part of their work. We have strained a few predictions out of focus, and thereby have lost the real content of their message.

And

Still there were some predictions. the predictions of the true prophets were justified in the sequel. But very often the predictions of the false prophets came true. Moses, who himself had occasion to compete with false prophets, gave directions concerning the futility of this test:

If there arise in the midst of thee a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and he give thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or unto that dreamer of dreams: for Jehovah your God proveth you, to know whether ye love Jehovah your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after Jehovah your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him.-Deut. xiii. 1-4.

There was only one way to test the prophet's message, and that was by its righteousness and truth.

Every other test breaks down.

There is no way to measure length save by something that has length, or weight save

by something that has weight. One may not measure yards of silk with a pound weight, nor weigh coal with a yardstick. Value must be measured by that which has value, and truth must be tested with truth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual, and comparing them spiritually. That is the only test.

That being true, and there being no cheap and easy way of testing truth, I wonder whether, if we had been living in Jeremiah's day, we should have believed him or the false prophets, who preached so much more attractive sermons, and sermons apparently based on the precedents and predictions of Isaiah.

To be sure, those were wrong who thought the false prophets the true disciples of Isaiah. Jeremiah was such a disciple, though his message was in some respects directly contrary to that of Isaiah, and both were true.

The bother of all this is that it disposes of all cheap and easy tests of truth, and puts us under a heavy burden. God could have saved us a lot of trouble by providing us with a gauge and a chopper by which to test prophetic utterances. He has given us no test of truth but truth itself; no way to measure righteousness save by righteousness.

This being so, I wonder whether, if we had been living in Jeremiah's day, we should have stood with him or with the men whom now we call the false prophets.

I also wonder several other things.

I wonder if this is not what Jesus had in mind when he said that it was a regular habit of humanity to despise present truth and build sepulchers for the prophets whom our own fathers have slain, while we go straight on furnishing our own children employment for the marble-cutter.

Really, this view of the matter is very disconcerting, and I think we had better stop before we get into unpleasant discussions. Don't you?

Topped by the slouching store and slim flagpole,

Loomed grand as Rome to his expanding

soul;

Grandly the rhythmic beat

His strident echo stung the lake's wild dawn And startled him from dreams. Jock rammed his cap

And rubbed a numb ear with the furry flap, Then bolted like a faun,

Bounding through shin-deep sleigh-ruts in his shaggy brawn,

Blowing white frost-wreaths from red mouth

agap

Till, in a gabled porch beyond the store, He burst the door.

"Mother!" he panted. "Hush! Your pa ain't up;

He's worser since this storm. What's struck ye so ?"

"It's volunteers !" The old dame stammered Oh !"

And stopped, and stirred her sup Of morning tea, and stared down in the trembling cup.

"They 're musterin' on the common now." "I know,"

She nodded feebly; then with sharp surmise

She raised her eyes:

She raised her eyes, and poured their light on him

Who towered glowing there-bright lips apart, Cap off, and brown hair tousled. With quick

smart

The roar of brass and unremitting roll

Of drums and drums bewitched his boyish

mood

Till he hallooed.

Copyright, 1914, by Percy MacKaye. See editorial entitled "A Prophetic Commemoration "} on another page of this issue.

66

2 In the naval battle of Plattsburgh the American commander Macdonough himself worked like a common sailor, in pointing and handling a favorite gun. While bending over to sight it, a round shot cut in two the spanker boom, which fell on his head and struck him senseless for two or three minutes; he then leaped to his feet and continued as before, when a shot took off the head of the captain of the gun crew and drove it in his face with such force as to knock him to the other side of the deck."-From "The Naval War of 1812," by Theodore Roosevelt.

How many a lonely hour of after-woe She saw him so !

Jock !" And once more the white lips murmured "Jock !"

Her fingers slipped; the spilling teacup fell

And shattered, tinkling-but broke not the spell.

His heart began to knock, Jangling the hollow rhythm of the ticking clock.

"Mother, it's fight, and men are wanted!" "Well,

331

The mother, when the door flew wide. There' shone

A young face like a star,

A gleam of bitter-sweet 'gainst snowy islands far,

A freshness, like the scent of cinnamon, Tingeing the air with ardor and bright sheen. Jock faltered: "Jean !"

"Jock, don't you hear the drums? I dreamed all night

I heard 'em, and they woke me in black dark. Quick, ain't you comin'? Can't you hear 'em? Hark!

The men-folks are to fight.

I wish I was a man !" Jock felt his throat clutch tight.

"Men-folks!" It lit his spirit like a spark Flashing the pent gunpowder of his pride. "Come on!" he cried.