CHAPTER I PROPHECY THE CHIEF MODE OF INSPIRATION Of recent years much attention has been paid to the study of the psychology of religion. For the most part the investigation has concerned itself with those interesting but obscure processes whereby religious conviction is transmitted from mind to mind, and establishes itself in the heart of the believer. In other words, the subject of inquiry has been mainly the psychology of conversion. Comparatively speaking, the psychology of Inspiration remains an almost untrodden field. And yet it is one that invites exploration. Conversion is the appropriation by the individual of spiritual truth already familiar to others, Inspiration the communication of something new to the world at large. If in the one case careful observation of psychological phenomena has to some extent revealed the conditions of the crisis in the individual life, in the other also it is possible that a similar method of inquiry may throw some light upon the transmission to man in the first instance of new fragments of divine knowledge. Revelation, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews impresses upon his readers, has been imparted to the fathers in sundry portions and diverse manners. That the process of communication has been marked. throughout by an extraordinary variety none will deny. Yet the recognition of this undoubted truth is entirely B consistent with the hope that beneath the variety it may be possible to trace the working of some persistent and fixed principles. It is at least conceivable that the study of man's mental capacity for the reception of new religious truth may disclose the presence of some constant factors in religious genius, some uniform peculiarities of religious temperament present in all those who have been selected by the Holy Spirit to be the medium of a revelation. In an inquiry of this kind the main source of information will naturally be the personal records of revelation. From this point of view their multiformity is an immense advantage. In the divine library of the Bible we are provided with the first-hand narratives of a large number of inspired persons, diverse from one another in a hundred ways, yet alike in this, that through each one of them some fragment of spiritual truth was for the first time published to the world. It will be the purpose of our inquiry to search these records with a view to discovering something as to the conditions under which the mind of man has apprehended the Divine message. Prophecy is one of the most important of the distinguishing features of revealed religion. The religion of Israel possessed an immeasurable advantage over the faiths of the neighbouring tribes in being the appointed sphere of the working of 'men of God'. Again, at a later period in the history of the world the renewal of the gift of prophecy was the outward and visible proof of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The supreme value of the gift lay in the fact that it was the driving power of that onward and upward movement which is the incontrovertible evidence of life. The knowledge of God is like other |