Says her Royal Highness, looking over my shoulder, "You have written quite enough about those crazy, vulgar people. It's all old world talk. There are no prophets now; there never will be any more."
No more prophets! The _prophetical succession_ never stops, never will stop. When Muggleton died Emanuel Swedenborg was a boy of ten; twenty years afterwards the new prophet was walking about London just as the old one had done, living the same lonely life, conversing with the angels and writing of heaven and hell and conjugal love, and--well, a great deal else besides; and, odd coincidence, it was in that same Eastcheap where Muggleton had damned the Quakers in 1653 that the Swedenborgians held their first assembly in 1788, just about the same time that Joanna Southcott came to London, and before Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were born or thought of. No, no. The prophets are not improved off the face of the earth. They never will be. They will turn up again and again. You can no more hope to exterminate them by culture than you can hope to produce them by machinery. _Propheta nascitur non fit_. For once her Royal Highness was wrong.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Coming of the Friars, by Augustus Jessopp