“The Prophets of Israel”

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 154, 27 March 1937, Page I (Supplement)

“The Prophets of Israel”

4 6 A they shall beat their swords into ploughshares ami their /%. spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against I nation, neither shall they learn war any more, and none shall A Jk make them afraid.” “Through such words men can catch a glimpse of a world they must try to create. Not centuries, but milleniums, have passed since those words were written, and yet they do not bring a sense of hopelessness that as they never have been made true, so they never will be,” writes Miss Edith Hamilton, in her book, “The Prophets of Israel.” “Fire is in them forever to kindle the desire that they shall be true. 'The excellent becomes the permanent,’ said the Greeks. When mankind have seen a good, they do not ever let it go. They are not able, as human beings, it is not in them to blot it out completely, and forget it. What the prophets wanted for the world has never been dropped from men’s consciousness. The possibilities they discovered we still must strive to realise. The desires of the best and greatest have a strange authority; they carry compulsion. “Only the outside of life changes. Within, the thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun. 'The Old Testament is the great book of human experience, and the greatest experience in it is in the prophets. They had profound knowledge of the matter fundamental to all knowledge; they 'knew what was in man.’ Their words do not startle us with a sense of something strange and new; they starlie us witli the revelation of a community of feeling, a similarity of outlook, between us ami that distant, antiquity. "They discover to us what was always in us although we had not known if. They are spokesmen for humanity. Wo realise through them not only the permanence of every great vision for the good, but the continuity of hitman life, the underlying unity of human beings. Life looked the same to

them as it does to us, so brief for all its strange unbroken How, with birth forever following upon death. They saw it as we do. and before its mystery they felt the same sharp pang of pain. “This realisation of how unchanging human experience is does not bring a sense of discouragement as lack of progress along other linos does. On the contrary, it is fortifying. Because all those before us have died, death is easier to face. They suffered and endured to create a better world, and in some strange way we are constrained to do the same. Because we are compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses we ean run with patience the race set before us.” “In Miss Hamilton’s view." says the “Scotsman,” “the Old Testament prophets were practical men. They disregarded theology; they never enunciated a. creed or stated a dogma; they never gave a definition or worked out a formula. "Ainos was the first of labour agitators, and his younger contemporary. Hosea, had ‘no faith in the saving etlicaey of punishment, or in its inevitable consequence the faith in power as meritorious and admirable of itself.’ The first. Isaiah knew the world, and fixed his eye on life. ‘The only minutely detailed picture he has drawn is of women’s dress.’ Jeremiah was the first pacifist, bid his pacifism, unlike that of to-day. was not a protest against the evil of war. ‘lt: was a declaration of enlightened reason about the folly of war.’ “In spiritual elevation and intellectual power. Ezekiel was below his predecessors, but in practical efficiency he outdid them all. ‘lt was lie who laid down the lines along which the Hebrews wore enabled io remain Hebrews, although they were never again to bo an independent people,’ In a book written with vivacity. Miss llaniilloii discusses all the prophets of the < ilil Testament, and concludes with a striking summary of the llionght of these lonely men which lias value to-day.”