"In justification of this idea of a double sense, he (Dr. Arnold) continues: 'The notion of a double sense in prophecy has been treated by some persons with contempt. Yet it may be said that it is almost necessarily involved in the idea of prophecy. Every prophecy has according to the very definition of the word, a double source; it has, if I may venture so to speak, two authors, the one human, the other divine.... If uttered by the tongue of man, it must also, unless we suppose him to be a mere instrument (in the same sense as a flute or a harp), be colored by his own mind. The prophet expresses in words certain truths conveyed to his mind; but his mind does not fully embrace them, nor can it; for how can man fully comprehend the mind of God? Every man lives in time, and belongs to time; the present must be to him clearer than the future.... But with God there is no past, nor future; every truth is present to him in all its extent, so that his expression, if I may so speak, differs essentially from that which can be comprehended by the mind, or uttered by the tongue of man. Thus every prophecy as uttered by man (that is, by an intelligent and not a mere mechanical instrument), and at the same time as inspired by God, must, so far as appears, have a double sense; one, the sense entertained by the human mind of the writer; the other, the sense infused into it by God.' We must confess our amazement at the obvious and extreme unsoundness of this whole passage. Not only does it painfully remind us of the double meaning so often and so justly charged upon the Pagan oracles--but it assumes the strange and contradictory improbabilities: first, that God was unable to convey his meaning to the mind of the prophet; secondly, that he infused this meaning into the words which were uttered, although he could not infuse it into the mind of the man who uttered them; and thirdly, that we can see further into the mind and meaning of God than those to whom he spoke; that they in expressing the ideas which he had put into their minds, mistook or imperfectly conceived those ideas,--but that to us is given to discover a thought which those words contained, but did not express, or which, if they did express it, they were not understood by the writer to express. Now, either the ideas which God wished to communicate were conveyed to the mind of the prophet, or they were not; if they were so conveyed, then the prophet must have comprehended them, and intended to express them correctly--for it is monstrous to suppose that God would infuse ideas into a man's mind for the purpose of being communicated to the public; which ideas he yet did not enable him to communicate; and then all the above confused subtleties fall to the ground. If, on the other hand, these ideas were not so conveyed to the prophet's mind, then it must have been the words and not the ideas which were inspired, and God used the prophet simply as a flute (a supposition scouted by Dr.