Such was the future disfigured by kings and the successors of kings. Understand it well; this is not oppression, but deliverance! It belongs to the letter to impose itself by force; this is its necessity; it has no other way, if this can be called a way. To the spirit belongs the appeal summoning us to the liberty of man and the liberty of God. Ubi spiritus, ibi libertas. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Therefore, I do not see in the Messiah's hands a sword besmeared and gory. I see nations rise up spontaneously, like a sea shuddering to its deepest abysses. Fluent ad eum omnes gentes; this is not servitude; it is deliverance. This is not the reign of the Messiah victor; but it is the reign of the Messiah liberator.
But you ask me whose is this voice preaching a spiritual kingdom to priests, a divine royalty to kings and nations? The voice shall interpret itself; it shall tell its origin and mission.
Here Père Hyacinthe relates the famous vision in which Isaiah receives his mission after a seraph has purified his lips with a burning coal. This is prophecy.
And were not prophets and saints; necessary to the Jewish Church, as they are necessary to the Catholic Church? The two beggars in the dream of Innocent III. upholding the crumbling Lateran basilica, as if symbolizing the decadence of the hierarchical church in the middle ages; those two mendicants, Dominic de Guzman and Francis of Assisi, what were they but prophets of the New Testament, sprung not from the hereditary tradition of ages, but from the living kiss of Jehovah? Yes, we need saints, we need prophets—that is to say, men of love, martyrs; men of vision who read not only according to the letter but according to the spirit, who see God in the vision of their reason enlightened by faith; in the ecstasy of their conscience elevated by grace. "I have seen the Lord with my eyes"—Oculis meis vidi Dominum. We need men who speak to him face to face like Moses, and, above all, men who love him heart to heart, and pass through the struggles of days and ages, struggles only to be fully understood by contemplating them in the final future. Vidit ultima, et consolatus est lugentes in Sion. Such men were the prophets.
They were seers. They saw the future. They did not look only upon the present, so accurately fitted to the measure of narrow minds and hearts. They did not return with cowardly tears toward the past, never to be born again. It was for Gentiles, for pagan antiquity, to dream of a golden age for ever lost. The prophets, gazing into the future, saw the golden age of Eden reappear, under a form more full and lasting, at the gates of heaven, yet still upon the earth.
The prophets believed in the future because they believed in God. They believed in progress; they were in all antiquity the only men of progress. Antiquity did not believe in it, not even knowing its name. But the prophets believed in the most incredible and the most necessary of all progress, moral and religious progress. They believed in it despite the fall, or rather because of the fall and of the redemption. To them evil did not lie in radical vice, essential to our nature, or in the inflexible decree of destiny; it was in the liberty of man, and must find its remedy in the liberty of God. If God had allowed the starting-point of man to recoil, be cause of sin, into the abyss, it was in order to raise, through the redemption; his goal to the very heavens. From the summits to which their faith lifted them, they saw salvation spread from individuals to nations, from nations to the human race, from the human race to all nature.
Such was progress to the prophets; such the future universal Sion they hailed in the future? Isaiah prophesied it in the existence and in the relative prosperity of Jerusalem. Jeremiah mingled it with tears shed over the smoking ruins of his beloved city. Ezechiel in the bosom of captivity pictured Sion, no longer Jewish, but humanitarian, where all nations were to find their place. He engraved upon the pediment of the gates this immortal device, "The Lord is there;" Dominus ibidem.
II. This was what the prophets, men of faith in vision and men of vision in faith, believed and respected. This was the object of their love, for they were men of understanding, and also men of heart.
I do not love Utopians, I do not love thought which dwells exclusively in the future, feeding on sterile and chimerical dreams. I love men of the future who are also men of the present; contemplatives, but workers too. The prophets were workers. They did not love the future in the future, but in the present where it germinates. They did not love humanity in humanity—too abstract if it be an idea, too vast if it embrace all individuals; they loved humanity in their nation; they loved the typical Jerusalem of their vision in their terrestrial Jerusalem of their existence.