and idolatry not unworthy of a Jewish Prophet. Yet he cultivates a genial sympathy with both tyrants and idolaters. No one, he believes, willingly invents an idolatry or imposes a tyranny. All such evils grow up by the degeneration of what was originally good. This degeneration, he thinks, might be prevented, if free access to all knowledge available at any epoch were given to all persons living at that epoch. The Prophets, he thinks, might have simply annihilated all false religions by explaining how they originated in natural and cosmical appearances. Why then give an apparent reality to the heathen gods by railing against them as if they were real? The true God would surely have found it as easy to convince idolaters as to punish them.
He who comments thus on the great men of the past, while professing to think that all accessible truth ought to be made available for all men, seems to have been keeping himself cool in his study, writing a treatise for the benefit of a possible posterity, who would need his instructions all the less for being already enlightened, while his contemporaries were, all around him, sunk in the most degrading slavery and superstition. He is criticizing men like Isaiah and Jeremiah, who had courage to enter into serious conflict with the vices of their own age, at all risk of disturbing the perfect balance of their own nervous systems. And here we find the answer to the question, why Isaiah was more truly a Prophet than Boulanger. A Prophet is a plain utterer; i.e., he not only sees truths ahead of his age, and thinks that the people ought to know them, but is so filled with the love of truth and right that he cannot lead a life of studious calm while self-interested charlatanism is misleading the
