Prophecy is born of prayer, supported by it, not the prayer of words, but that attitude of soul, of will, of which the most beautiful of our collects are the momentary reflections. In this spirit then, feeling our need and our fellows', let us long for more light to come into our lives. Let us remember that we have not just to sit down contentedly in the dark and wait for God's light.
If we try to listen to the voice of the prophet teachers of the past whose message still comes home to us, and to picture the thoughts of some disciple of theirs to-day, might we not frame them thus?
"If we cannot scatter the clouds, we can at least clean our windows and open our doors. Every faculty of our nature is God's gift and to be used in His service, and so we are not to think of prophecy [p.55] as coming with the atrophy of the intellect; with every power of our minds we are called to serve God and seek truth, which is His revelation. To pray, ' Thy will be done ' should be, as Fogazzaro has told us, no attitude of passive submission, but a call to our whole nature to strive to the utmost for the cause of God.
"Then we must remember that the more truly we are at one with Christ, the more we shall feel ourselves fundamentally united with all our fellows. We shall feel their wrongs and sins as ours, and their needs too, and as we come to feel this, we shall realise more and more that in every act and word and thought we are not our own.
"Every evil desire overcome is a victory for our brothers, and not merely for ourselves. Our lives are intertwined one with another, and constantly, unseen and unknown to ourselves and each other, we influence one another for evil or for good. The prophet is nothing else than a true priest, not to one or two, but to a multitude.
"We are all called to be priests, and, if God calls us to be prophets, in learning to be truly priests, we shall unconsciously be learning too in the prophets' school.
"The priest must have a two-fold vision, of the truth above him and of the brother beside him who has need of the truth. The more he can see of either, the more he can be brought into communication with his fellows, and with the truth, the more priestly will his service be. [p.56] "Let us be faithful in word and deed to the highest that we know, and higher things shall be revealed unto us. Let us be patient with the worst and those who naturally repel us. Far more repulsive has been the evil in our own thoughts in the eyes of the holy angels. Let us not be uplifted because others have been helped through us; Truth is not ours, but God's.