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The word of the prophets has two aspects: it is, on the one side, a
Message from God, and, on the other, a Message to Men.

1. The word which the prophets wielded was the word of God. Herein lay
the secret of its power. For the word of God is the thought of God;
and this is more ancient than the stars and lies more deeply embedded
in the constitution of things than the roots of the mountains; it is
the prop by which the universe is sustained. God's word is before all
things, for it created them; and his thoughts are the rails on which
the course of the world runs.

It was the privilege of the prophets to approach so near to God, to
enter so completely into sympathy and fellowship with Him, and to
know so clearly what were His purposes, that their own thoughts became
identical with His; and, therefore, when they spoke, their words were
God's words. Not only do they preface many of their utterances with
"Thus saith the Lord," but--what is far more strange--they often
begin, without any preface, and go on speaking in the first person
singular, when not the prophet but Jehovah is the speaker; as if their
personality were so enveloped in His as to disappear altogether.[24]

But this remarkable knowledge of the thoughts of God was not given to
the prophets for themselves. The philosopher may shut himself up in
secret to study the laws of the universe and keep his conclusions to
himself; and even the poet perhaps may be so happy in his own vision
of beauty that he does not care to utter his song to the world; but
not so the prophet. He, indeed, was also, in the strictest sense, an
original thinker, and the new conceptions of God which he was
privileged to convey to the world dawned upon his own mind with that
secret delight which makes the creative thinker feel himself to be

"Like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken."

One of the prophets gives expression to this secret joy when he says,
"Thy words were found and I did eat them, and Thy words were unto me
the joy and the rejoicing of my heart;" and, after a night spent in
receiving revelations, he says, "On this I awaked and beheld, and my
sleep was sweet unto me." But the knowledge of God's mind and will
which the prophets obtained was not for themselves, but for others. It
was not abstract knowledge, but a knowledge of God's will about the
course of history--about "what Israel ought to do.