It may appear repulsive to those who have made up their minds as to the methods by which the Spirit of God can work to trace back the supreme genius, the impassioned ethical ideals, and the practical statesmanship of the great Prophets of Israel to movements bordering on insanity; yet it is from enthusiasm that most of the great saving movements of the world have come. Certainly the great religious revival which was soon to come in Israel owed almost as much of its success to these bands of enthusiasts as to the personality of Elijah. It falls now to our task to trace the movement from bands to individuals, from Prophetism to Prophecy, from a phenomenon to a teaching. We have records of men who seem to have moved beyond the mantic stage and who prepare the way for the great Prophets. We can conveniently call these "transition prophets." We shall find that they bear some resemblance to the old style of Seer, or to the guild prophets, or to both. Of some of these we have only the merest mention, so that they may be called the _minor_ transition prophets. Two stand together by their connection with David and from the fact that they both seem to have been Court officials (2 Sam. vii. 2; xxiv. 11; 1 Kings i. 10). There is no word here of the mantic fury of the early prophets; although in Gad, who makes known the best way to escape the anger of an offended Deity, we have a survival of the ancient seer; but in Nathan we have a truly noble example of one who, although he may have been dependent on David for his daily bread, yet faced him with the unsparing denunciation of his sin. Here is a man who regards right in Israel more than the smile of princes, and who has a higher conception of his office than that of a convenient manipulator of oracles for the flattering of a King. Nathan is a true ancestor of Amos and Jeremiah. Ahijah the Shilonite is famous because he foretold the disruption of the Kingdom (1 Kings xi. 29-31), and we may see in this the beginnings of that political judgment which was to become notable in the later Prophets; although a partisan motive might be suspected in this particular case, when Jeroboam, in later years, sent his wife to consult Ahijah, accompanied with the usual fee (1 Kings xiv. 2), the message he received shows that in Ahijah we have no party politician, but the impartial judgment of the later Prophets.