muel said to Saul: "Hath the Lord as great delight
in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of
rams." And so afterward Isaiah declared in the name of the Lord, that the
sacrifices of a wicked people were vain, and their incense an abomination.

We read of the schools of the Prophets, where they studied the law of
Moses, and were taught the duties of their office. In these schools music
was made use of as a medium of inspiration.

But the office of a prophet was not limited by culture, sex, age, or
condition. Women, like Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Huldah, and Noadiah;
inexperienced youths, like Jeremiah; men of high standing in society, like
Isaiah and Daniel; humble men, like the ploughman Elisha and the herdsman
Amos; men married and unmarried, are numbered among the Prophets. Living
poorly, wearing sackcloth, feeding on vegetables, imprisoned or
assassinated by kings, stoned by the people, the most unpopular of men,
sometimes so possessed by the spirit as to rave like madmen, obliged to
denounce judgments and woes against kings and people, it is no wonder that
they often shrank from their terrible office. Jonah ran to hide in a ship
of Tarshish. They have called their message a burden, like Isaiah; they
have cried out like Jeremiah, "Ah, Lord God, I cannot speak, for I am a
child"; like Ezekiel, they have been obliged to make their faces harder
than flints in order to deliver their message.

Dean Stanley, in speaking of the Prophets of the Old Testament, says that
their theology consisted in proclaiming the unity of God against all
polytheism, and the spirituality of God against all idolatry, in declaring
the superiority of moral to ceremonial duties, and in announcing the
supremacy of goodness above the letter, ceremony, or dogma. This makes
the contrast between the Prophets and all other sacred persons who have
existed in pagan and, he adds, even in Christian times. Dean Stanley says
the Prophets were religious teachers, without the usual faults of
religious teachers, and he proposes them as an example to the Christian
clergy. He says: "O, if the spirit of our profession, of our order, of our
body, were the spirit, or anything like the spirit, of the ancient
Prophets! If with us truth, charity, justice, fairness to opponents, were
a passion, a doctrine, a point of honor, to be upheld with the same energy
as that with w