the literature of ecstasy and represents the zenith of its achievement. It is the emotional verbal utterance of the unconscious of the poet, who is usually in a state of ecstasy, and who, as passages in the Bible testify, receives his message in a vision or dream. The act of prophesying was even contagious. The early prophets were like dancing dervishes in their prophesying and influenced others to do as they did. We recall how Saul stripped himself naked. The Hebrew word prophecy means utterance and the idea of foretelling the future was incidental to it. If the idea of futurity emanated from prophets, it was such insight as any gifted person may experience when he notes certain facts from which he can predict inevitable results. But the ecstatic state was always associated with the idea of prophecy, the only person, according to the account of the Bible, exempt from this state being Moses. The prophetic state was not allied to divination but resulted from moral and aesthetic inspiration such as we find in modern poets. When the Bible says, God spoke to the prophet, or the hand of God touched him, it means that the prophet was in a state of ecstasy due to a highly developed moral and social viewpoint. The true prophet's ecstasy was not accompanied by immorality or superduced by drugs or physical abuse. Music, however, was at one time used to produce the prophetic state. The aesthetic mechanism of the ancient

prophets was no different from that of any great poet with a message of modern times. Moses Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed analyzes the ecstatic state of prophecy and his analysis may be applied to any high form of poetic inspiration.

Prophecy was, according to Maimonides, an emanation sent forth to man's rational faculty and then to his imaginative faculty; it consisted in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty; the logical and imaginative faculties had to be balanced in the prophet; he overflowed with the frenzy of ecstasy to help his fellow-men and could not rest even at risk of personal suffering; he had courage and intuition; he reserved his message in a dream or a vision.

The psychology of the prophetic inspiration has been studied by many of the higher critics of the Bible. One of the best books on the subject is The Psychology of Prophecy by Dr. Jacob H. Kaplan, Philadelphia 1908, (Julius H. Greenstone) who says: