"Somewhat; and yet through some such agencies came the givings forth of the Prophets."
"You believe in the Prophets?" asked Case.
"Assuredly. The many generations which inherited from each other the seer faculty, developed and improved, living the secluded, severe, and simple lives of the anchorite, amid the grand and solemn silence of mountain and desert, were enabled, by wondrous and protracted effort, to wear through the filament—impenetrable as adamant to common men—that screened from them the invisible future, and they told What they saw."
"Yet they never told it so that any mortal ever understood what they said, or could apply their visions to any passing events, and the same givings out of these half-crazed old bards, for such they were, have been applied to fifty different things by as many different generations of men," said Case.
"That may have arisen, in part," said Bart, "from the dim sight of the seer, and the difficulty of clothing extraordinary visions in the garb of ordinary things. It is not easy, however, for the common mind to see why, if God had a special message for His children of such importance that He would provide a special messenger to communicate it, and had a choice of messengers, it should reach them finally, in a form that nobody could interpret. With God every thing is in the present, all that has happened, and all that will, is as the now is to us. If a man can reach the power or faculty of getting a glimpse of things as God sees them, he would make some utterance, if he survived, and it would be very incoherent. Besides, human events repeat themselves, and a good general description of great human calamities would truthfully apply to several, and so might be fulfilled your half hundred times, Mr. Case."
"That isn't a bad theory of prophecy," said Case approvingly; "but all these marvels were in the old time; how came the faculty to be lost?"
"Is it?" asked Bart. "Don't you hear of it in barbarous and savage conditions of men, now? Our friend Sartliff would say that the faculty was lost, through the corruptions and clogs of civilization; and he proposes to restore it."
"No, I don't propose to restore that exactly. I want to find a way back to Nature for myself, and then teach it to others, when the power of prophecy will be restored. I want to see man restored to his rightful position, as the head of this lower universe. There are ills and powers of mischief now at large, and operative, that would find their master in a perfect man. One such, under favorable auspices, was once born into this world; and we know that it is possible. He took His natural place at the head; and all minor powers and agencies acknowledged Him at once. I have never been quite able to understand why He, with His power of clear discernment, should have precipitated Himself upon the Jewish and Roman power, and so perished, and at so early a day in His life."
"So that the prophets might be fulfilled," said Case.
"It may have been," resumed Sartliff.