The Passing of the Prophet

I

‘WHAT the world needs,’ said my friend, ‘is a big man — a leader — a prophet. The world suffers for his coming.’

I pondered — or seemed to ponder — his words. Did the world need a prophet? What kind of prophet did it need? What would the world do with him if it had him? What is a prophet, anyway?

In this order my mind asked the questions, obviously because the first was provoked by my friend’s contention. But they seemed to require answering in reverse order. For how could I determine to my own satisfaction whether the world needs a prophet until I had settled with some definiteness the last question, ‘What is a prophet?’

‘It is obvious,’ said I to myself, ‘that a prophet, with the possible exception of the weather prophet, is no longer a man who predicts the future. Predicting the future is a risky business these days and even weather prophets have been known to go astray. Perhaps a prophet is a man who discloses people to themselves. Possibly his function is to point out the world’s needs, lay bare people’s shortcomings, then urge that they act upon his advice — set out upon some definite path, follow some definite ideal.’

The answer did not seem very satisfactory or very complete. It was not a good picture of the prophet. When one considered the prophets of Israel — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos — one had a vision of tall, stern, bearded figures who harangued people in the market place or at some solemn festival and informed them that some doom was about to fall unless they repented. The dénouement came with sickening regularity — the people failed to repent, and the doom fell. The net result of this kind of prophecy seemed to be to make people uncomfortable. Since the doom needs must fall, why not let the people be happy in the interim? All that this type of prophet ever seemed to gain by his haranguing was the scant satisfaction of a Cassandra, ’I told you so, and now you see it has fallen out as I predicted.’ Scant satisfaction in that for anyone. These I might call the ‘gloom and doom’ prophets.

But over against this type I set another more modern type, the prophet of joy. ‘There’s a good time coming,’ said he. ‘Health, wealth, and happiness await you.’ This kind of prophecy was highly profitable, for the prophet of joy sent the people off walking on air. He had that valuable asset of the successful prophet — glamour.

‘Have you heard the news?’ says one passer-by to another. ‘There s a good time coming — we are all to be healthy, wealthy, and happy.’

This prophet was a joyous person as he stood in the sunlight, clad in gold and purple. He was good to look upon and people loved to listen to his glowing words. But there was something wrong with the picture. In the first place, the people had not questioned nor had the prophet informed them by what means these things were to come about. If he had, it was through some miraculous intervention — angels were to descend and put their foes to rout, or a glorified hero was to appear to bring in the millennium. This kind of prophecy would not bear the scrutiny of analytical minds.

The other thing that was wrong with the picture was that there were no shadows, there was no room for the tragedy of life.

‘Suppose,’ said I to myself, ‘some good woman who has lost her only child comes to this prophet of joy and asks for comfort.’

‘My good woman,’ says he, ‘you must not look on the dark side of things. Look on the bright side. See, the sun is shining.’ Then he would pluck a flower with the morning dew fresh upon its petals and say, ‘ Here is a lovely flower; admire its tender hues and the freshness of its fragrance. Yes, to be sure your child is dead, but never mind — look on the bright side.’ How angrily the bereft woman would spurn the prophet’s well-meant admonitions and kindly reproof, how disconsolately she would move away.

The gloom prophet was stern, uncompromising, forbidding, but the joy prophet was something worse — he was shallow. One would want to step up to him as he harangued of joy and light in the market place and shout in his ear the one word, ‘Buncombe!’

Of course, there was a third type of man — the man who faced issues, saw things as they are, told people the simple truth about themselves and the world, encouraged them to formulate and solve their own problems, and let it go at that. But then he was no prophet, — at least in no generally accepted sense, — he was just a plain, ordinary, common-sense, everyday man with insight.

Fancy a conversation like the following. Two roughly dressed men carrying dinner pails meet in the street.

‘Bill,’ says Jim, ‘Frank’s a prophet.’

‘Frank’s a what?’ says Bill.

‘A prophet. He told me that I am spending too much money, that I neglect my work, and that my pi-g headedness is sure to get me into trouble if I don’t watch out. He turned me inside out, he did; he showed me up in great shape.’

‘Oh, hell!’ says Bill.

I fancied that this type might after all be the true prophet. But then there was no glamour, no necromancy about it. A prophet without glamour and necromancy was unthinkable, at least according to any accepted standards. He must come either clad in resplendent robes or eating locusts and wild honey. He must, above all, be picturesque.

Then it occurred to me that that is what people want and what they mean by ‘prophet.’ He is a picturesque figure who works some necromancy by which people are saved without effort. That is the secret of prophecy — he saves them without effort on their part.

I submit that this is to take a wrong view of life. It is what occurs in legend, myth, and fairy tale. In these tales people get into serious difficulties — largely through their own selfishness and shortsightedness — and a romantic supernatural figure appears who extricates them from their difficulties by speaking the magic word or by the aid of some talisman.

This sounds puerile enough, but the fact is that man is not yet emancipated from belief in the power of the magic word. He still believes, though he dare not own it, in the omnipotence of thought — thought divorced from action. He still believes in djinn, genii, fairies, and the intervention of angels. He is credulous, no longer with an avowed and explicit, but with a halfconscious implicit, credulity.

‘Business is bad,’ says he, ‘but something will turn up.’ He still believes in magic, in miraculous intervention. He is slow to learn the fact that nothing is likely to turn up until human effort turns it up.

II

The kind of prophet for whom my friend was looking is the kind who makes people feel comfortable in the midst of individual and collective adversity. But have they the inherent right to feel comfortable in the midst of adversity? Has n’t, that always been the trouble with man, that he tends to sit down comfortably in the midst of adversity, to say, ‘It is the Lord’s doing,’ whereas he ought to rouse himself to appropriate action whereby he may climb up out of adversity? It was John Stuart Mill, I believe, who used to speak of the ‘accursed wantlessness of the poor.’

It is the attitude of subservience. It is simpler and easier to yield to the pressure of circumstance, to wait for the prophet who will speak the word of deliverance, than it is to think a way out and rouse ourselves to action. The demand for the prophet, the ‘big man,’ the ‘leader,’ then, grows out of human inertia. As we grow less subservient we demand this kind of prophet less.

When I had reached this conclusion it occurred to me that what the world needs is not a prophet, — in the sense of a leader, a deliverer, — but what it actually needs is concentrated and collective effort. For such effort to be intelligent, the world needs the interpreter rather than the prophet. Though we may not admit it, the world is in crying need of my third type of man, the man who will disclose to men their inner selves, — their shortcomings, their failures, their potentialities, — the interpreter who will assist them to find the way and urge them to walk therein.

‘But, ’I said to myself, ‘is this man not the truest kind of prophet? Surely the prophet has always been some kind of interpreter, but usually an interpreter of far-off and supermundane things. This prophet will interpret things close at hand.’

There, likewise, was implicit the answer to my third question, ‘What would the world do with the prophet if he should appear?’

Well, we do not like interpreters who disclose our own weaknesses. We much prefer prophets who predict a solar eclipse or the end of the world. In such case the rest of the world is bound to share our experience, which makes it bearable. Not so with interpreters of our inner selves. We escape from them as fast as we can. We call them in extreme cases ‘fanatics,’ or in mild cases ‘bores’ or ‘enthusiasts.’ (It is only in New England, I believe, that ‘enthusiast’ is an opprobrious term.) For the prophet has his one string upon which he harps in and out of season. If he is a man of strong character — and what prophet is not? — he seeks to impose his beliefs upon mankind. There is but one way of escape from your real prophet — crucify him. It is what the world has always done and what it probably will always continue to do — crucify its prophets. It nails them to some kind of cross, which may be another reason why the prophet is passing.

Men do not want truth — they want comfort and complacence. A series of pictures passes through my mind as I contemplate this fact — Martin Luther forcibly siezed by rough men in the darkness of the Thuringian Forest and hurried off to the Wartburg lest his enemies set upon and destroy him, Galileo kneeling in abnegation before the august College of Cardinals, Copernicus exiled to a small town, Dante banished to the city of Ravenna, the funeral pyre of Shelley on a storm-swept coast, Keats coughing out his life in Rome by the Spanish steps, Roentgen dying in poverty in Berlin. And these were only lesser crucifixions. There was

Moreover, it is rare that the real prophet is recognized while he is still alive. Were Keats and Shelley — prophets of the inner life — recognized as among England’s greatest poets while they breathed the breath of life? Who appreciated the significance of the Reformation until long after Luther’s bones had turned to dust? What did his own contemporaries think of Charles Darwin? What do many of our foremost scientists think of Einstein?

If the prophet is right, his novel views demand a revaluation of life. This revaluation is neither comfortable nor easy; it is almost sure to mean action of an unaccustomed sort, even a complete reversal of our way of life. It gives men a profound shock to discover that they have hitherto pursued a way of life and thought that is both wrong and futile.

Men are resentful. A new philosophy, if it contains aught that is valid, upsets old things, and more than one man’s life work goes for naught. A new scientific hypothesis, once it gains credence, means that the work of a myriad researchers in a myriad laboratories has been so much waste effort. Who that has put the best years of his life into erecting a fine structure of thought will welcome with equanimity the discovery of facts that relegate his work to the scrap heap?

This, of course, is not rational behavior. Rationally, we ought to accept the new with acclamation. But if the new psychology has rendered us one service more than another it is to demonstrate that for the most part men’s behavior is to be explained on an unconscious emotional rather than a conscious rational basis. No one readily forgives a wound to his amour propre. We are Narcissistic. The first natural feeling aroused when we discover that our life plans are set at naught is a feeling of resentment. But resentment must have an object. There is slight satisfaction in retiring Achilles-like to our tents to nurse our grievances in silence. Most of us love to shout them from the housetops, or at least write the Times about it. We want an object for our wrath. The logical object is the man who — however unintentionally — has upset our life work. We are always ready to cry, ‘Crucify him!’ Disappointment turns to angry resentment, resentment cries out for an object on which to vent itself. It is the primitive in us.

To be sure, our methods are more indirect than formerly. A member of a savage tribe dies. Here, it is believed, is the work of a malign intelligence. Who by thought or word brought the agency into play by which the deed was wrought? Let us discover him and, when discovered, let us put him to death. It is the talion law. But if we fail to discover him, another will do as well. If a sacrifice is made, justice is satisfied. After all, the Jewish institution of the scapegoat was valuable. The goat, full-fed, was turned loose into the wilderness. Justice was satisfied and the goat suffered no harm.

Something of this primitive punitive conception of justice survives in us. Never was the need so great of constant revaluation of our universe as it is to-day. We live in a world of seething change. The nineteenth century claimed to have solved all the mysteries, the twentieth in its revaluation of its universe knows that it has but skirted their rims.

III

We are at sea in this strange world, this ‘space-time world’ of Einstein and Whitehead. The old chartings will not suffice—they are meaningless. We look for some pilot to steer us into safe havens. We cast longing eyes upon certain ones who seem to qualify, but we do not like their handling of the ship; we fear that in escaping a known danger — a granite rock — we shall founder on some hidden shoal. That is the sort of leader for whom the world hopes at the present moment — someone to bring order out of chaos. We vex ourselves in vain. He will not appear. The day of scapegoats and vicarious atonements is past.

If we have erred in this twentieth century, no one but ourselves is to blame, and no one but ourselves can extricate the world from its difficulties. There is no panacea. There must be collective, intelligent effort.

The day of great military, political, philosophical — yes, and industrial — leaders is gone. They went out with the passing of the nineteenth century. The science of social psychology has shown us all too clearly where the fault lies — in ourselves. It discloses men’s motives in the group life as not overhigh.

This collective effort will be all the more difficult because as we evolve we become more individualized. Glenn Frank, writing in the New York Times Magazine, predicts that the next achievement of our American culture will be along artistic and literary lines. He holds that the machine age has reached its apogee and we are ready for a more selective culture. This means increasing individualization. If this be true, we are on the wrong track for supreme collective effort. Without collectivity of thought there can be no leader, for a leader without followers is no leader at all. What or whom does he lead? In my student days a young man of my acquaintance thought that the time was ripe for the establishment of a new church, a church which would do away with dogma and get back to first principles. It was to be simple and fundamental. It was to be called starkly ‘The Church of God.’ He rented a disused school building. But when he opened it for meetings no one came. He was in the ridiculous position of a shepherd without sheep — a leader without followers.

According to the neovitalistic school, as the organism evolves it becomes more highly individualized. It gains greater mobility, a greater independence of movement. When it comes to integration on the psychological level, the evolutionary trend is toward an ever greater independence of thought and action. As man evolves intellectually it is increasingly difficult for him to raise one of his own number to the level of the prophet.

It is due to their own feelings of inferiority — Janet’s sens d’incomplétude — that men seek a leader. To seek adventitious aid is to confess failure. As men come to possess themselves, they incline less to seek such aid. As they develop self-reliance, they lean upon individual leaders less or not at all.

The last of the great Jewish leaders of ancient times was Judas Maccabæus. His efforts failed — failed because his followers could not exert collective effort and expected him to deliver them single-handed from their enemies. Since then there has been no great Jewish leader of his type.

What of Jesus? Humanly speaking, he must have been considered by his disciples to have failed. He was crucified, dead, and buried. Where was now the glorious kingdom that was to be set up in Jerusalem? Where were the legions of ministering and defending angels? Where the splendor? He had died a felon’s death. It seemed for some time as though his very gospel were to be lost forever to mankind. The little Christian church at Jerusalem under the leadership of James lived briefly through a lingering death and was snuffed out. Then came Paul. Paul was among the prophets. It was Paul who spread the knowledge of the gospel throughout the Græco-Roman world. Many commentators say that it was not so much the gospel of Jesus that he taught as it was his own metaphysic and philosophy of life. It is certain that under his influence Christianity became something other than what Jesus taught.

What is the prophet, the prophet who is acclaimed? The embodiment of a group idea. William Jennings Bryan was preëminently that — and nothing more. When he sought to be original he failed again and again as prophet. But as Fundamentalism grew in strength and adherents he became increasingly popular. It was not that he made any original contribution — far from that. He was the very epitome of Fundamentalism. It just happened so.

The mass of men are inarticulate. A great organized group demands and requires for its very existence a mouthpiece, a vehicle for the expression of its ideas and ideals. He is spokesman for the people, and should he grow away from them and become his own man his influence is disintegrating. Hence, he is crucified.

It would seem as though we should never have another great prophet — first, because in the light of our common mechanical industrial age it becomes increasingly difficult to cast a glamour; second, because we are becoming more individualized, and the great racial, national, and religious groups dominated by a single idea are breaking up into smaller groups each with its own end and purpose. Time and education have done that for us. Cite Amos and Elijah as we will, there can be no great popular prophet without a large following, and, as we have pointed out, the shepherd can be no shepherd unless he have sheep.