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PRETENSIONS OF THE DEVIL.

These dreams seem to have been their own credentials in as eminent a degree, practically, as those of which it is said "God appeared," or "the Lord appeared;" and to have met with an acceptance as completely free from doubt or demur as they. Indeed, looking especially to the dream of Joseph, the transcendently important object of which was to defend the purity of the conception of Jesus, it may not be improper to infer that the only cause for differencing it from the others which, with a greater degree of verbal explicitness, are said to have been consecrated and even organized by a manifestation of the Deity, was an accidental difference of the phraseology· employed in its narration. Joseph was a second time "warned of God in a dream," an expression by which the alternatives of Divine or angelic presence are left undecided, and which, in fact, does not necessarily include either; and still a third time a revelation from heaven was vouchsafed, when "the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him (Matt. ii. 12, 13).

It will be remarked that neither God nor good angel ever informed a dream which was not to answer some moral, didactic, benevolent, or grand economical purpose. The aimless prurience that would pry into futurity, the impertinent curiosity that irrationally set itself up as an end to itself, never received any the slightest honour or encouragement, nor ever set in motion the meanest of the heavenly hierarchy.

(2.) But as most good things, just in proportion to their value and dignity, give rise to counterfeits, and as the devil is unresting in his endeavours to subvert or distract the kingdom of God, it was natural that designing men, his agents, ambitious of personal aggrandisement, or greedy of material emolument, should set up as interpreters of the Divine will and purposes on the strength of their own inventions, tact, or foresight, or in

GOODNESS OF NECESSITY AND OF CHOICE.

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reliance on the false pretensions of evil spirits, to a knowledge of futurity and a power over destiny. The tendency to such a profession had already been made apparent in fact, or seen as a future probability by the distance-searching eye of Moses, when he cautioned the people of Israel against those prophets who, so long after as the time of Jeremiah, exercised their profession as vendors of dreams, visions, and divinations. "If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth 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 that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul" (Deut. xiii. 1—3). The words in italics call to mind the apostolic injunction: "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John iv. 1). An undiscriminating goodness, a goodness of necessity and without an alternative, is a comparatively insipid virtue; and that is most real which, after essaying to disentangle the right from the wrong, elects to abide by the former. Thus, while we as men confess ourselves lower than our fellow-servants the angels, it is a proud thing, amidst our hazards, to think that we, although in a less magnificent service, are probably in a more picturesque position than they, and one which gives an opportunity of demonstrating, under fierce and chronic temptations, rectitude of character and conduct of a kind morally more grand than theirs.

The second class of dreams are chiefly to be found stated abstractly, or by way of allusion and warning; and scarcely ever emerge above the horizon in the shape of particular instances. "Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you; they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord. . . . I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I havo

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DENUNCIATIONS OF FALSE PROPHETS.

dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams, which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream: and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord. Is not my word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbour. Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that use their tongues, and say, He saith. Behold, I am against them that prophesy false dreams, saith the Lord, and do tell them, and cause my people to err by their lies, and by their lightness; yet I sent them not, nor commanded them; therefore they shall not profit this people at all, saith the Lord" (Jer. xxiii. 16, 25-32). Many other passages of like purport might be cited from Jeremiah, who, however, does not stand alone in the grave sorrow of his admonitions to alienated Israel. The prophet Zechariah has the following: "For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams; they comfort in vain" (Zech. x. 2).

Now if the dreams suggested by God or by good angels were obnoxious to the liability of being counterfeited by the devil and his confederates, it was necessary to have certain recognized principles by which their divine or their satanic suggestion could be determined. These principles, as laid down by Moses Amyraldus, were few and simple. This author, it may be parenthetically remarked, had a very decided penchant for considering the ordinary dreams of men as the effects of angelic operation, good or evil, on the mind of the dreamer; an opinion in which he is much favoured by Bishop Ken and others. Amyraldus, paraphrasing and grouping together the tests given in the Bible, ruled that one proof

of a dream being of divine authenticity, whether directly communicated or by angelic ministration, was that it conveyed intimations of such things as it was competent for God only to know and to reveal.

The dreams, again, of which good angels were the patrons, necessarily conduced to piety. "The images imprinted by good angels upon the fancy never contained anything of idolatry or pagan superstition, whereas those which proceeded from evil ones were commonly full of it; for in these there was always some representation of false gods, or something which concerned their worship, or some other vision of that nature, which denoted the author of the dream to be willing to authorize idolatry or superstition, from which the inclination of good angels was always very distinct."

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The dreams caused by evil angels did always, or for the most part, induce to some evil actions, which those originating with good angels could never do. "That which might render the discovering between these two more doubtful or more difficult is, that upon various occasions, angels of darkness might transform themselves into angels of light, and endeavour to impose upon the credulity of the faithful" by causing them to have dreams, seemingly good or indifferent, but subtilely and secretly having some evil tendency or capability of being used for evil purposes.

(3.) Of the third class of dreams we have said that they are to be judged indifferently, being barely and indifferently narrated. It may be well at once to qualify this indifference as a verbal and formal one. The word is intended to express only that the sacred text does not announce for these dreams anything Divine about their external mechanism; and that their claims to Divine authenticity must rest upon their internal evidence. Thus the dream of Jacob (Gen. xxviii. 10—15), remarkable as it is for the encouraging truth of its pregnant and magnificent symbolism, may, in default of an express declaration of its origin, be judged indifferently by, so to say, a secular canon, and one altogether different from

that applicable to those dreams of which it is stated that “the Lord" or "the angel of the Lord" appeared in them. It would be a long task fully and minutely to discuss the illustrious vision of the fugitive and sleeping patriarch. It is nearly sufficient to insist upon the fact that it is the mind of the dreamer, and not God or his angels, that takes the initiative in the pageant. For aught that appears, the reality of the vision was a subjective rather than an objective one. God does not appear, but is seen; it is discovery rather than manifestation. Under what influence or guidance soever it might be that the imagination of the dreamer, unfettered by will, was called out to act, there would seem to have been an effort, in some way God-originated, on the part of the lower to ascend to the higher, and not of the higher, in the first instance, to let itself down to the lower. The ladder is set up on earth and reaches to heaven; whereas the method of pure revelation demands a proceeding the converse of this—that the ladder should be suspended from above; for, although the safer method of man be the inductive, the grander method of the Infinite God is ever, if not necessarily, deductive.

The dreams of Joseph, while yet at home with his family, though they were afterwards seen to have foreshadowed his future advancement, rested at the time of their occurrence with no other effect than that of inflaming and perpetuating the envy of his brethren and the uncertain speculations of his father (Gen. xxxvii.) Yet upon these dreams, as afterwards upon the dreams of the chief butler and the chief baker of the king of Egypt, and the dream of Pharaoh himself, depended the plans which God had elected to observe for the trial, the education, and the government generally, of his people Israel. Of the foregoing dreams, as of those by the interpretation of which Daniel distinguished himself over the wise men of Babylon, it will be observed that they were not sent capriciously or without a purpose; and that, if not to the dreamer, then to some other more worthy person, the solution of the