Remark. Compare Oehler Programm über das Verhältniss der alttestamentlichen Prophetie zur heidnischen Mantik, Tübingen 1861, and Tholuck, Die Propheten und ihre Weissagungen, Gotha 1860, § 1. Die Mantik. Apuleius in the Metamorphoses, Lib. VIII, gives a clear picture of a soothsayer belonging to the troop of flagellants of a Syrian godess: Inter haec unus ex illis bacchatur effusius ac de imis praecordiis anhelitus crebros referens, velut nimium divino spiritu repletus, simulabat sauciam vecordiam, prorsus quasi Deûm praesentia soleant homines non sui [έavtõv] fieri meliores, sed debiles effici vel aegroti ; "meanwhile one of them behaved himself like a raging madman, and breathing all the while most deeply from his inmost bosom, as though overfull of the divine spirit, feigned sickly nonsense, just as if through the presence of the gods men were not rendered better than they had been before, but as though they were thereby made weak and sick." Chrysostom alsó characterizes the difference between the mantis and the prophet in the following manner (Hom. XXIX in ep. ad Corinthios): Τοῦτο μάντεως ἴδιον· τὸ ἐξεστηκέναι, τὸ ἀνάγκην ὑπομένειν, τὸ ὠθεῖσθαι, τὸ ἕλκεσθαι, τὸ σύρεσθαι ὥσπερ μαινόμενον. Ὁ δὲ προφήτης οὐχ οὕτως, ἀλλὰ μετὰ διανοίας νηφούσης καὶ σωφρονούσης καταστάσεως, καὶ εἰδὼς ἃ φθέγγεται φησὶν ἅπαντα, ὥστε καὶ πρὸ τῆς ἐκβάσεως κάντεῦθεν γνώριζε τὸν μάντιν καὶ τὸν προts; "This is the peculiarity of the mantis: to be beside oneself, to suffer constraint, to be struck, to be stretched, to be dragged like a madman. The prophet however is not so, but, he speaks everything with calm understanding, and with sound self-possession, and knowing what he proclaims, so that before the result we can even from these things distinguish between the mantis and the prophet."

S 21.

The Mantic as Necromancy.

The heathen belief, which became changed in practice, did not however remain at this point, but broke through the boundaries between the world of men and spirits, so that the words daiμoνιώδης οι δαιμονικός became designations conveying an idea similar to that of θεῖος or dios and θεόπνευστος, and penetrated the barriers between this and the next world, since they called up persons from the realm of departed spirits. The disclosures concerning the future, secured in this way, although in certain cases in accordance with truth, as the address of Samuel to Saul in Endor shows, were yet a sacrilege, that is a robbery committed by breaking into a forbidden sphere. Hence the heathen mantic ended in universal bankruptcy, precisely at the time when the predictions of the Old Testament prophets became yea and amen in Christ.

Rem. 1. Josephus says explicitly in Bell. Jud. VII, 6, 3: tà daιóvia пovýрõv ἐστιν ἀνθρώπων πνεύματα. “The demons are the spirits of bad men.” Plutarch

also, as well as Heraclitus and Pythagoras, in Diogenes Laert. IX, 7; VIII, 21. 32. 36, calls the spirits of the other world uyàs dowμátovs, "disembodied spirits". Rem, 2. Prophecy and mantic stand to the history of the people in an inverted relation. Prophecy becomes more and more intense, the deeper it descends with the history of the people, while mantic rises and falls with the intensity of the heathen nationality. As the national character of the Greeks degenerated the mantic accomplished nothing more. Pythia in Plutarch's time no longer disApollo had no answer for the emperor

coursed in winged, poetical sayings. Julian.

CHAPTER V.

God's Mode of Communication with the Prophets.

§ 22.

Revelations through Dreams.

The prophet, while the God of revelation works in him, is either in a sleeping or waking condition. The mode of revelation in the condition of sleep is by means of dreams. The dream is in itself a natural event, and receives as such, on account of its connection with the sexual life, the name . In spite of its natural character however it has always in itself something wonderful, since it shows that the daily side of the soul has a nightly side as its background, and since through the bringing forward of this nightly side it causes capabilities of an unusual elevation, or which were even unknown in daily life, to appear. To the fulness of the powers, slumbering in the soul, which are frequently evolved in sleep, belongs the power of divination, relating multifariously to individuals and nations. Although dreams are mostly phantoms and caricatures (Ecc. V, 6; Sirach XXXI, 5), yet this deep and far-reaching view of the dreamer is not only recognized by heathen witnesses, such as Aeschylus, Eumenides ver. 106, but also by the Holy Scriptures (compare The Wisdom of Salomon XVIII, 19), which relate many predictive dreams like Gen. XL, for the explanation of whose origin, the inborn, natural gift of prophecy suffices.

Rem. I.

E. von Lasaulx in his ingenious and learned work: Die prophetische Kraft der menschlichen Seele in Dichtern und Denkern, München 1858, levels too much the difference between the prophecy of redemptive history and the heathen divination and mantic, since he derives both from the sinking of the individual soul in the soul of the universe. There where both meet together, as he affirms, this concurrence is rooted in the religious and moral yearnings of

the human soul, which stand forth in the heathen world as longing voices, and to which prophecy affords a divine answer. Thus the description of the righteous man, in the second book of Plato's Republic, who suffers and endures to the end, must be referred to the demand for the realization of the moral ideal; and the description of the golden age in the fourth Eclogue of Virgil is best explained by the demand for a termination of history which corresponds to its paradisaical beginning.

Rem. 2. Such a heathen seer, whom Paul himself (Titus I, 12) calls a prophet, was Epimenides, born at Gnossus in Crete. The altar of the unknown God, which Paul found in Athens was one of the sacrificial places, which Epimenides had erected, as he was called to Athens, in order to atone for the plague and other misfortunes of the stricken city, with the presupposition that there might be an unknown diety whose wrath rested upon the city.

$ 23.

The Prophetic Dream.

Differing from such visions of the future, which only providentially happen to correspond to the circumstances, are those divinely wrought, as Gen. XXVIII; Dan. II. The Holy Scriptures allow for both kinds of dreams, a capacity of interpretation given from above (Gen. XL, 8; XLI, 16; Dan. I, 17). If however the revelation in the dream serves not only personal, but also professional ends, then it properly is the prophetic dream. This kind of revelation in a dream ( Num. XII, 6) is the lowest grade of revelation. The only biblical example of it is Dan. VII. The prophetic dream is God's mode of revelation to the heathen world, as in the Old Testament to Abimelech (Gen. XX, 3—7), Pharaoh (XLI, 1—7, compare ver. 25), Nebucadnezzar (Dan. II, 1—3, compare ver. 28), and in the New Testament to the Magi (Matt. II, 12), and to Pilate's wife (XXVII, 19). The natural life here becomes the medium of revelation, and there is great danger of deception; hence Jeremiah (XXIII, 28) speaks so depreciatingly of the dream, and it is generally false prophets and soothsayers who proclaim what they have dreamed (Jer. XXIX, 8; Zech. X, 2).

Remark. In the life of Jacob, besides the phrase, which occurs once (Gen. XXXV, 9), and 2, twice (XXXI, 3; XXXV, 1), the revelation in a dream is found twice (XXVIII, 12; XLVI, 2). In all God reveals himself to Jacob five times in his life of one hundred and forty seven years.

S 24.

The Prophetic and the Mantic Ecstasy.

A dream is always an experience which occurs in sleep (Job. XXXIII, 15; Is. XXIX, 7), ecstasy on the contrary which receives its name from a transference beyond the natural mode and the present world of perception, is always an experience which occurs when one is awake. The deep sleep (27 LXX exotaots) which falls upon Abraham (Gen. XV, 12) is not a natural sleep. Sometimes there is connected with the prophetic ecstasy, as with the mantic, a cataleptic condition, but this is only where the one seized with the prophetic spirit is uncongenial, as a Balaam or a Saul. Moreover the prophetic ecstasy differs from the mantic therein, that the prophet does not put himself in an ecstatic condition by means of narcotics, that he does not come forth under sickly appearances, which border on madness, and that his experience does. not resemble that of the Cumaean sibyl, who, when the ecstatic inspiration left her, had no remembrance of that which she had spoken.

Rem. I. The observation of Riehm, Messianische Weissagung, Gotha 1875, p. 17, that the ecstatic condition is a mark of a lower grade of prophecy, only applies to that ecstasy, which in an almost pathological manner does violence to nature; for ecstasies are really special advantages, which prepare the prophet for his calling, and strengthen him therein, and which make him in special cases the mirror of divine thoughts and things.. Paul also says (2 Cor. XII, 1-6) that he could boast of ecstasies; but within the church he only attributes a relative value to the ecstasy of tongues (1 Cor, XIV), when that, which the one speaking with tongues as with the voice of an angel, is translated by an interpreter from the realm of the spirit (võμa) into that of the understanding (vous).

Rem. 2. Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel, London 1877, p. 86, holds that the ecstasy in itself is no supernatural phenomenon, and that it is to be explained as originating from the human organism, specifically from the nervous system. From this it appears that he knows no distincton between the realm of nature and that of grace, which as we believe and know is the realm of the miraculous.

$ 25.

Prophetical Inspiration.

Dreams and visions are at all times only sporadic modes of revelation. The more continued intercourse of God with the pro