now at the Institution four children from the same family, all mutes, whose parents were neither blood relations nor intemperate. It is a great affliction, one that we who have always had these senses, cannot understand, nor can one that has always suffered the loss know what they are deprived of, but those who once heard and have lost the power can. Never have I heard this more beautifully or pathetically put than in a letter I received from the late J. B. Ashley a few weeks before he died. me the following: He wrote "I was over thirty years of age when the sweet sounds of nature were silenced to my hearing. I had then experienced so much pleasure from oratory on the platform and in the pulpit, vocal and instrumental music, the laughter of happy children, the singing of birds, the sighing of the winds, that the losing of my hearing was a terrible deprivation. I was passionately fond of public speaking, music entranced me with a sort of heavenly influence. The warbling of the birds in the early spring-time seemed like a benediction from the Giver of all good. "Perhaps the most delightful sounds that can reach our ears is the laughter of children when enjoying their out-door play. Since losing my hearing it has been hard to reconcile myself to my lot. I worried over the great loss so acutely that my mind became clouded, but when enjoying good health I enjoy many of the pleasures of life and am enabled to say to my Heavenly Father, 'Thy will be done.'” We who have the blessing of hearing and speech are, or ought to be, thankful to God, and should use these gifts to His glory. We also join with those who are deprived of them in thanking God that we have in our Province an institution so fully equipped that will bring to these afflicted ones the blessings of communication and also educate them for the life to come. CANADA'S EMBLEM. OUR beautiful Canadian maple-tree Carmine to give thy hidden tracery? As from thy wounds ambrosial sweetness drew Our sires, or hewed thee down, we plant once more Prized far; and emulate each day anew In our north land, of grace and strength thy store; Light, sweetness, help to give like thee we pray. WHAT is a prophet? We must first understand what manner of men prophets are before we can tell whether they are needed by the Church. Turning to our dictionaries, we find that a prophet is called in Hebrew, in Greek popητns, in Latin Propheta. The ordinary Hebrew term is Nâbi, from Nabba, to bubble forth like a fountain, and would seem to signify one who, under an irresistible impulse of God's Spirit, breaks out into spiritual utterances. Ps xlv. 5. (R.V.) "My heart overfloweth with a goodly matter," or, "is bubbling up of a good matter." A prophet is primarily not a fore-teller but a forth-teller; one who pours forth-as a spokesman-the announcements of God. Two other Hebrew words are employed (Roëh) and (Chozeh), one who sees, or a seer-one whose eyes are opened towards God, who possesses spiritual insight, who can see and cause to be seen by others the Truth of God. The same persons are designated by the three terms. The word propheetees in classical Greek signifies one who speaks for, or as the mouthpiece of, another, especially of a God. In popular speech, the word prophecy commonly signifies prediction; although, like the word Inspiration, it is used both in a broader and in a narrower sense. The prophet, then, is one who utters forth the truth which has been communicated to him by God. The ancient prophets formed an order distinct from the priests. The priestly order were at first the sole teachers and rulers of the Jewish Theocracy; but during the time of the Judges the priesthood degenerated, and with them the people. Samuel was a great religious reformer, and he organized the old prophetical order which has existed all along, and raised it to a new importance. With a view of placing his work on a permanent footing he instituted the Companies or Colleges of the Prophets (1 Sam. xix. 19, 20), to which others were added at various points after his death. The prophets were teachers. Their chief study was the * An address delivered before the Toronto Ministerial Association. law and its interpretation. Music and poetry formed part of the course. Weekly or monthly meetings were held for the exercise of the prophetic gift. The prophets were not opposed to the priests or princes as such, but they fearlessly taught the truth, whomsoever it might hit, and denounced unrighteousness whereever it was found, from the throne downwards. The prophet married or not as he chose; but his manner of life, his dress, his diet, were stern, austere, and unconformed to the world. But to belong to the prophetic order was one thing, and to possess the prophetic gift was another. One might be of the order without having the gift, or have the gift without being in the order. Generally the inspired prophet was a graduate of the College of the Prophets and a member of the order. When Amaziah would silence Amos, the latter replies: "I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit: and the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel." (Amos vii. 14.) The sixteen canonical prophets seemed to have belonged to the prophetic order, as well as to have possessed the prophetic gift. Hundreds of prophets contemporaneous with them, who had received like training, are not raised to the same dignity, because they lacked the divine call and the inner sight and light. Isaiah, vi. 8; Jeremiah, i. 5; and Amos, vii. 16, declare their special mission. Nor was it enough for this call to have been made once for all. Each prophetical utterance springs from a distinct communication made by the Divine to the human spirit. * What then are the characteristics of the canonical prophets? 1. They were the national poets. 2. They were annalists and historians. 3. They were preachers of patriotism. 4. They were teachers of morals and of spiritual religion. 5. They were extraordinary, but yet authorized, exponents of the law. See Isaiah's description of a true fast (c. 58)-it being their special office to bring out the inner and spiritual side of duty and of truth. 6. They held a pastoral or quasi-pastoral office. 7. They were a political power in the state. 8. They were instruments for revealing God's will and purposes to men, especially by predicting future events. When we pass to New Testament prophets we find them to be chiefly supernaturally-illuminated expounders and preachers. Prophecy was a spiritual gift which enabled men to understand *See "Smith's Bible Dictionary." and teach the truths of Christianity, especially as veiled in the New Testament, and to exhort and warn with authority and effect greater than human. (1 Cor. xii.) Has the Church a need of prophets at the present time? Surely we need Christian national poets. Our hymn-writers do in a measure supply this need. Their influence is enormous. "Let me make the songs of a nation and let any you choose make the laws." But what we need is a poet of deeper insight, of more majestic flight than a Cowper, a Milton, a Tennyson, or a Browning. The great poets are the interpreters and moulders. of thought of their age, a mighty barrier against the flood of materialism and of atheism. We need great Christian historians, who shall give history in its true colours, as showing the footsteps of God, and who shall neutralize the perverted learning and the anti-Christian bias of a Gibbon. And we need prophets and preachers with patriotic hearts. We need prophets more than we do fashioners of theological systems. Prophets who shall bring out the inner and spiritual side of truth and duty, in its application to all relations of life-domestic, social and national. We need Christian prophets. God-inspired scourgers of mere ministers of routine who speak their denominational shibboleth rather than the vital truths which God has spoken to their hearts and which are experimentally the guide and spring and inspiration of their lives. We need Christian prophets, who will not parade in sacerdotal garb, or rest in symbolic sacrifices, or mystic symbolism, or æsthetic forms, or temple music; but who will breathe into their worship the breath of life, and lift up the voice of a trumpet in the slumbrous sanctuary. We need political prophets of the Bible type, and Christian politicians, not of pinchbeck, but of gold men who are Christians first and politicians afterwards, not politicans first and Christians as may seem expedient. Prophets who seek not to make Churches into political machines, but to scour our ballotboxes with the fuller's soap of righteousness and truth which alone can exalt a nation, and to turn statesmen and rulers into servants of God. We need outspoken mouthpieces of heaven, who call a spade a spade, and fearlessly assault with the club of God's Holy Word every kind of wickedness in high places, so that our Herods of the nineteenth century must either silence their repróver or give up their harlot. We need college-bred prophets. We could not do without them in the ordinary work of the Church; but still more do we need from time to time an Amos, a Luther, and a Moody, who come clothed with spiritual power from the presence of God Himself, untrammelled by the conventionalities of the Churches, and who depart with an empty purse, having not exalted themselves but the Lord Christ. We have college-bred preachers and sermonmakers in abundance, who study how to gather and hold an audience, and make good collections, and who have a quick ear for certain calls "Speak, my lords, for thy servant heareth." We have a goodly number of prophets, well housed, well dressed, and well fed, and crowding into cities; but the Church would be none the worse of a few more in garments of camel's hair, ready to go into the wilderness and live on the modern or local equivalent to locusts and wild honey. The prophets the great prophets were reformers. They swam against the stream; they shouted out in God's name, not what the people wanted to hear, but what God bid them say, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear, and their stipend was regularly paid in stones and arrows and stripes. We surely need more of such men. But what are the conditions of our modern prophet or pastor under the voluntary system? Would it be anything short of a miracle, if he fulfilled the rôle of a great prophet? Hired by a congregation to voice the opinions of the purse majority of his supporters, he is liable at any day to be removed, or frozen out, or starved out, with a wife and family, it may be, dependent upon him. Liable he is at any rate, to lose a hearing by those who spew out unpalatable truth, and thus he forfeits the very pulpit from which he has the opportunity of testifying to the truth that is in him. How shall he withstand Ahab or Diotrephes to his face, and tell him by name that he is troubling Israel? We can all crow loudly and clap our wings bravely on our own dunghill, surrounded by an admiring flock, but how many of us will take in hand to reprove or rebuke or oppose our own. constituency? Many a man is praised for his brave outspokenness, because when safe inside his own fence he has rated soundly the passers by. How brave a thing it is for a Protestant minister in an Orange constituency to lash the Pope and Roman Catholicism, when perhaps he dare not do anything else! How should the modern prophet set himself to oppose the popular social or religious fad, or delusion, or bigotry, or traditionalism of his denomination, or of his age? I remember noticing, when I first went to live in the neighbouring States, how men smacked their lips when they said such and such a minister was popular. That word summed up all minis |