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But our Bauddha friends are the less justified in making claims to any unnatural exception in such things, since their whole faith professes to be in a way a development of nature. They accept the S^nkhya doctrine, that all effects are contained in their causes; they are less justified, therefore, in assuming upon vague and traditionary testimony effects for which nature, stript by them of active Deity, retains no adequate cause. It is more probable that the shaping power of imagination should have given birth to the stories of the lionf, and the serpent, and the demons shivering around th§ Saviour, than that things so unnatmral should have happened : and if this probability gains strength with every year of interval before the chronicle is written, so it cannot be gainsayed by a theory of inspiration. For whatever this heing inspired may properly mean, it does not mean a heavenly communication of earthly facts to any chroni- cler. I have said that the Hebrew writers do not in that sense even claim it. But yet the art of writing, and the zeal for the • See above, page 33. t See above, p. 161. INSPIRATION IN GENERAL. 475 honour of God or of one's country, and the spirit of religious truthfukiess, with which a man may record things, will bring even the task of a chronicler within that range of providential teaching, which embraces, I suppose, all wholesome things, and which the old Hebrews describe with intensity as a * fulness of the spirit of the Lord.' But more especially whatever is most direct, and has the power of motive, as a feeling or a passion which stirs a man's nature, and which comes upon him he knows not how, or impels him to eflforts beyond himself, ia ascribed naturally to a higher breath than our own. In proportion as such impulses become also powers, they seem more properly Divine. Nor least of all, if a clear vision of any great and wholesome truth comes to us, it seems a gift not dependent on our own exertions, though perhaps it may have been secretly connected with them. Even our bodily sleep seems not depend- ent on our volition. Again, many states of the mind seem caused in us rather than by us. New truths strike us, or old ones come home to us, in a way we did not expect. Especially in the domain of sentiment, or of moral feeling, we have not only thoughts deeper than we can express, but better instincts or convictions, which are either intuitive or have a wisdom under- lying them more subtle than we can well trace in thought. Hence in a great number of languages such things are called by names taken from breath rather than speech, such as spirit, or aspiration^ afflatus, or Awen ; for they seem the very breathings of the mind. St Paul calls desires of this kind * groanings not to be uttered.' Thought is deeper than all speech, Feeling deeper than all thought : Souls to souls can never teach. What unto themselves was taught. I am far firom thinking that such perceptions or desires axe not connected with our general life and moral purity of mind. But yet they seem more immediate ; and so the Divine gift or impidse in them, being less veiled by an instrumentality of 476 INSPIRATION — GENTILE. things visible, is more easily traced to its highest source. More- over they are much connected with prayer, which I have called both an exertion, and also an intercourse of our soul with the eternal wiclder of all things. Thus the ideas of aspiration from man and of inspiration &om God go naturally together. Here too, doubtless, there is a Divine method, but it is more difficult to trace than in things less immediate. In all nations men have ascribed their highest impulses, and their best thoughts, and their most glorious achievements, to some Divine will or prompting. No one ever, says Cicero, was a great mariy wiihout some Divine breathing upon him. Especially in men who founded states, or organised human life by law, or in any way earned a fair memory by good deeds, both Cicero and all the religious thinkers of antiquity saw a Divine impulse ; though one acting not without reason, but rather by it and through it. Nor need we, my friends, doubt that, even amidst many errors and much confiision of thought, the Almighty led by methods of His own the ancient nations, and those most eminently, to which His gifts were greatest. You would not, I believe, exclude from such guidance the wonderful instinct of the ant and the bee, or the wild fowl which find their trackless path through heaven as the change of season requires migration; or, again, the affection of all the beasts of the forest for their young, or any other of the mar- vellous works which God makes signs of His invisible power in the tribes of living things. But more eminently we recognise it in the fuller consciousness of reason, and in the higher des- tinies of man. All piure thoughts and noble deeds, everywhere, whether the rearing of kingdoms or churches, or the establish- ment of laws, or the breathing of a purer spirit into religions, or again the quiet virtues of the household, and all gentleness or patience, seem to us, as to all the best teachers of mankind, to have come from no less a source. But when God imveiled His mind more clearly in Jacob, and established His fear in Israel, I suppose that His breath, which does answering things elsewhere, here especially stirred the hearts of men. Those sweet singers of INSPIRATION OF HEBREW PROPHETS. 477 the temple who breathed a deep desire for the presence of the All-holy One, and expressed their innermost perceptions of His Truth and Right, did not so aspire, without being also inspired. So the Prophets, or great Preachers of righteousness, when they denounced in fervid accents the wrong doing of priests and kings, or the madness of the people, and poured out with pas- sionate imagery their strong foreboding of judgments, must have had a true feeling of the righteousness of God, and of its irre- concilableness with any permanent prosperity for national guilt. But whence such feeling should come, unless it were taught them by the inbreathing of some holy impulse from their Maker, I cannot divine. It is true, the sympathies and capacities of moral insight and anticipation, and of speech, were given through nature and through education ; but all these things enter, ac- cording to my perpetual argument, into the long foresight of the Eternal, and have their inworking from His ever-present will. Nor is it difficult to conceive, that, as all strong emotion is a marvellous quickener of the intellect, in whatever direction it may be turned, so in the agony of national crisis, and in anger at pollution of the temple, or shame at the unworthy selfishness of religious literalism, the Prophets may easily, and I might almost say naturally, have seen fieurther than we ordinarily see into things to come. Nor is it my business here to dispute with those who think that the Prophets foretold even literal events from which centuries divided them. But it suffices myself to argue, that their vision of unchangeable truths gave them such an insight into the plan of the Eternal Governor of the world, that what they spoke of things of their own time will bear applying for all time, and especially to the most eminent instances of whatever they loved, or desired, or deplored. So that beyond the sphere of presentiment or sagacity, (which has been allowed them, and) which we can readily conceive both their education, and all their circumstances and feelings, would tend somewhat to enlarge, what I myself claim for them is a moral affinity to the thoughts of the future, rather than a 478 INSPIRATION OF HEBBEW PROPHETS. foresight of its events ; or, in other words, a predication of eternal truths, rather than a prediction of temporal accidents. K such view turn out correct, as it probably will, the harmony of the Divine dealings with man will be cleared up, and the whole theory of inspiration will come out reasonable. We have already seen, that earthly facts are recorded so far as they fell, by Divine Providence, within the natural sphere of the writer. Nor can it be denied, that the art, and science, and whole range of thought, moral, social, and religious, is that of the writer's time.