already revived the older custom of keeping the church. building open and ready for meditation and prayer all the days of the week. This will be greatly extended in the early future.

Moreover, there is need for a new prayer book. The modern cults with their manuals of private spiritual exercise and devotion have not made great inroads upon the bodies of Christians furnished with a book of prayers. It is to be hoped that soon some group of gifted and progressive leaders will begin the preparation of a Christian's Book of Devotion, which will contain a modern guide to Bible reading, a collection of prayers new and old, and perhaps other material. Meanwhile every family may be urged to possess a copy of the Book of Common Prayer; or "Prayers, Ancient and Modern," selected by Mary Tileston; or some other collection of prayers and proposals for meditation.

These suggestions by no means exhaust the possibilities. They are merely intended to intimate some simple and for the most part modest ways in which it is possible to begin an extended revival of the culture of religion. Let anyone utilize them all, and he will have a noble Cultus already. Whatever else hereafter may be, no one can tell. The temper of the new age will be far different from that just past. It will find itself and express itself according to its own genius. But there are already many signs, unless we fall backward into discordant and chaotic life generally, that the new age will seek to cultivate its ideals and hopes in more brilliant forms than we now use, and inculcate its standards by a more effective mode of religious education, and devote itself to enjoying the "history of the human spirit" and the presence of the Divine Spirit by usages and forms that will constitute a great historic Cultus.

T

Chapter IX: Prophet and Priest

HE conflict between priest and prophet is as old as history and it is not yet settled. Priests and prophets are always at odds. They always have been and they are now.

Priests have always stood for order and stability, the maintenance of things as they are; prophets have always produced disorder and change and hoped for things as they should be. Priests are conservers and instructors; prophets are radicals and destructors.

The conflict goes on because we have not yet learned to conserve the ancient and at the same time take on the new; we have as yet failed to solve the dilemma of stability and progress. We think we believe in progress, but usually resent it when we see it, for it always hits us at the sorest spot, it always strikes where we least expect. We assume that we have an open ear to new teaching, but when it comes, we cry out in dismay: Oh, yes, I believe in progress, but I had no idea you meant that. I can't accept that. We go on to complain of the new doctrine: Why, that subverts everything. Where are we, anyway, if that is adopted? But that is precisely what prophecy is, some new doctrine that is strong enough to subvert everything.

There was in an ancient day a priest by the name of Amaziah at the famous sanctuary of Bethel. His king and patron, Jeroboam II, was strong and successful. Commerce was good, the arts of life were advanced, religious observance was popular and elaborate. Amaziah conducted the burnt offerings and peace offerings, taught the children to observe the fast days, instructed the people in the moral law, and passed to and fro in the solemn assemblies. He was evidently a faithful priest. Then along came Amos the prophet and criticised everything. He said that the poor were being oppressed and the needy exploited and that the women

were too luxurious. Moreover, he claimed that the Lord had no delight in their priestly offerings, anyway, and would not smell in their solemn assemblies. Yea, rather, for all their sins the Lord would destroy the house of Jeroboam and lay waste the land. This was more than Amaziah could endure, so he “sent to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying, Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel: the land is not able to bear all his words. Also, Amaziah said unto Amos, O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: but prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court." To this Amos replied that the Lord had sent him and proceeded with his denunciation.

This story is a typical picture of prophecy and its obstruction by the priesthood. The priest teaches personal and individual matters; the prophet carries these up to some national or universal view for fresh examination and revision. The priest seeks the prevalence and power of present morals and customs as they are maintained by rites and forms; the prophet breaks present forms to lay foundations for a better morality that shall be. The priest relies on some ancient sanction for his sacred authority; the prophet claims the authority of immediate inspiration.

It is a small and inadequate conception of the prophet to regard him as one who foretells events. The true prophet is not concerned with foretelling events, but with foretelling the destiny of the new view of life which he has received. The true prophet receives the divine inspiration of some great new truth, some new way of looking at life. Thenceforth life as it is appears wrong to him; he criticises and condemns it. He does not know future events. But what he does know is that somewhere, sometime, all things, government and commerce, morals public and private, must come round to his idea, must square themselves with his new truth. He throws his word into the stream of history and lets it work. This is what Elijah did, and Amos and Jesus, Luther and Wendell Phillips.

We have thought of prophets as religious leaders whose

inspiration was acknowledged and whose word was received. This is because we look back so far on the most of them, and also because it is hard to believe they have anything in common with us nowadays. The fact is that, at the time, the prophet is almost always unpopular and rejected. The New Testament honors the Old Testament prophets, but in their own days the Old Testament prophets were not so honored. Jesus often thought of himself as a prophet and had the usual prophetic experience-"A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country." And out of his own bitter experience of rejection he thought of the prophets of old as he wept over the great city, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee."

Priests are teachers of the laws of life as they are received, upholders of the current customs and practices, mainstaying traditions, conservative because their business is to conserve the good that men already have. They are therefore none too friendly to prophets who protest and oppose tradition, who try to break down forms in the name of inner and spiritual light. The appearance of the prophet has always troubled the priest. What shall he do? If the prophet begins to gain popular support the priest declares that he is crazy. This has often been done and is not unlike the suggestion which President Hadley says that "hard-headed business men make regarding poets, professors and other idealists "That they have a bee in their bonnets.'" If this ridicule does not succeed, the prophet is persecuted. Amaziah the priest ordered Amos out of Bethel; Isaiah probably died a martyr to his prophetic truth; Jeremiah was tried for his life in the royal court in Jerusalem; Socrates was poisoned; John Huss was burned alive; Luther was hounded and excommunicated; and more than one professor has been driven from his university chair. Yet the word of true prophets has prevailed and is prevailing. People are always looking back to old prophets to honor those that are dead, and failing to see the live ones present with them.

And yet there is something to say for the priest. If the true prophet often suffers persecution and martyrdom, he

usually receives, at last, superior honors. The priest is never likely to receive either. When the prophetical storm has passed and the church and state are strewn with wreckage, the priest must take up the slow, hard work of reconstruction; he must gather up the fragments of old and new and make a practical building. When the final issue of antislavery prophecy had been settled by the Civil War, there remained the wreckage of the old South, and long pains of reconstruction were necessary before the new South began to appear. When the great prophets of the Reformation pulled down the whole structure of the mediaeval church in several nations, someone had to go to work to build another structure that would preserve the results and pass them on to other generations. This has proved to be so hard a task that the priests of Protestantism have not yet devised as good a system for conserving sanctions and standards as the old one was.

The work of the priest is a difficult one. He must take the new truths of the prophet and the great general principles laid down and he must study and apply them to particular conduct. He must tell people just what the great principle means in their homes, in their work, and in personal morals. He must say what is right and wrong in each special instance in such a way as to induce general agreement. The prophet disintegrates old standards; the priest must integrate new ones; and that is a very hard thing to do. It is disastrous to life to be all the while in a prophetic whirlwind. Society needs a hundred years or so of quietness and stability to make civilization possible.

The Priest is a Teacher. But how shall he teach the youth, if there be no general agreement about right and wrong which can be conserved and maintained for a season? How shall he instruct if there be no structure to put in? How shall childhood be guided and builded up into the right if you cannot say: This is the truth accepted among us, these are the standards society holds, this is the way you should go, walk ye in it? The priest is not therefore to be too seriously blamed for becoming a dogmatist. This is the function we have assigned him. He must integrate and construct,