into his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command
him,' invests his words with divine authority, calls for obedience to
them as the words of God Himself, widens out his sphere far beyond that
of merely foretelling, brings in the moral and religious element which
had no place in the oracles of the soothsayer, and opens up the
prospect of a continuous progressive revelation throughout the ages
('all that I _shall_ command him'). We mutilate the grand idea of
the prophet in Israel if we think of his work as mainly prediction, and
we mutilate it no less if we exclude prediction from it. We mutilate it
still more fatally if we try to account for it on naturalistic
principles, and fail to see in the prophet a man directly conscious of
a divine call, or to hear in his words the solemn accents of the voice
of God.

The loftiness and the limitations of 'the goodly fellowship of the
prophets' alike point onwards to Jesus Christ. In Him, and in Him
alone, the idea of the prophet is fully realised. The imperfect
embodiments of it in the past were prophecies as well as prophets. The
fact that God has 'spoken unto the fathers by the prophets,' leads us
to expect that He will speak 'to us in a Son,' and that not by
fragments of His mighty voice, but in one full, eternal, all-embracing
and all-sufficient Word. Every divine idea, which has been imperfectly
manifested in fragmentary and sinful men and in the material creation,
is completely incarnated in Him. He is the King to whom the sins and
the saintlinesses of Israel's kings alike pointed. He is the Priest,
whom Aaron and his sons foreshadowed, who perfectly exercises the
sympathy which they could only feel partially, because they were
compassed with infirmity and self-regard, and who offers the true
sacrifice of efficacy higher than 'the blood of bulls and goats.' He is
the Prophet, who makes all other means of knowing the divine will