Nobody can enter a fresh path, or bring a new vision of the meaning of life, or reinterpret old truths—in short, nobody can be a prophet—without arousing the suspicion and, sooner or later, the bitter hatred of those who are the keepers and guardians of the existing forms and traditions, and the path-breaker must expect to see his old friends misunderstand him, turn against him, and reproach him. He must endure the hard experience of being called a destroyer of the very things he is giving his life to build. Christ is, for example, hurried to the cross as a blasphemer, and each prophet, in his degree, has had to hear himself charged with being the very opposite of what he really is in heart and life. To be a prophet at all he must be a sensitive soul, and yet he must live and work in a pitiless rain of misunderstanding and attack. Still more tragic, perhaps, is the necessity which the prophet is under of doing his hard tasks without living to see the triumphant results. He is, naturally, ahead of his time—a path-breaker—and his contemporaries are always slow to discover and to realize what he is doing. Even those who love him and appreciate him only half see his true purpose, and thus he feels alone and solitary, though he may be in the thick of the throng. It is only when he is long dead and the mists have cleared away that he is called a prophet and comes to his true place. While he lived he was sure of only one Friend who completely understood him and approved of his course, and that was his invisible and heavenly Friend. But in spite of the tragedy and the pain and the hard road, the prophet, “seeing him who is invisible,” prefers to all other paths, however easy and popular, the path of his vision and call.
Just when life seems peculiarly crowded with items of complexity and importance, the telephone rings a determined, significant kind of ring. This is evidently no ordinary passing-the-time-of-day affair. I interrupt my weighty concerns and take up the receiver with expectation. I say “Hello!” but there is no answer, no human recognition. The wire hums and buzzes, instruments click far away, plugs are pulled out and pushed in. Little tiny scraps of remote, inane, unintelligible conversation between unknown mortals furnish the only evidence I get that there is any human purpose going forward in this strange world inside the telephone system where I can see nothing happening.