One charge against him has not yet been noticed. He has been accused of setting up himself for a prophet, of presuming to intrude into the secret counsel of God, and of enthusiastically confounding the suggestions of his own imagination, and the effusions of his own spirit, with the dictates of inspiration, and immediate communications from heaven. Let us examine this accusation a little. It is proper, in the first place, to hear his own statement of the grounds on which he proceeded in many of those warnings which have been denominated predictions. Having, in one of his treatises, denounced the judgments to which the inhabitants of England exposed themselves, by renouncing the gospel, and returning to idolatry, he gives the following explication of the {263} warrant which he had for his threatenings. “Ye would know the groundis of my certitude. God grant that, hearing thame, ye may understand, and stedfastlie believe the same. My assurances are not the mervalles of Merlin, nor yit the dark sentences of prophane prophesies; but the plane treuth of Godis word, the invincibill justice of the everlasting God, and the ordinarie course of his punismentis and plagis frome the beginning, are my assurance and groundis. Godis word threatneth destructioun to all inobedient; his immutabill justice must requyre the same; the ordinarie punishments and plaguis schaw exempillis. What man then can ceise to prophesie?”[325] We find him expressing himself in a similar way, in his defence of the threatenings which he uttered against those who had been guilty of the murder of king Henry, and the regent Murray. He denies that he had spoken “as one that entered into the secret counsel of God,” and insists that he had merely declared the judgment which was pronounced in the divine law against murderers, and which had often been exemplified in the vengeance which overtook them, even in this life.[326] In so far then his threatenings, or predictions, (for so he repeatedly calls them,) do not stand in need of an apology. Though sometimes expressed in absolute or indefinite language, it is but fair and reasonable to understand {264} them, like similar declarations in scripture, as implying a tacit condition.