Not only must a prophet speak in the language of a definite time, but he must speak to men as he finds them. This being so, we must expect that revelations will in a sense be accommodated to the apprehension of the day of their utterance. The minds of men are in constant movement. If the prophet were to have before him minds altogether at a standstill, he might well despair of accomplishing great results by his message. He would be forced to think of the intelligence of this day as a sort of vessel which he could fill with so much and no more. But whether the prophets have through the ages had any theoretic understanding of human intelligence as an organism or not, they have acted upon the assumption that they were dealing with such organisms. So they have conceived of their truth as a seed cast into the ground, passing through successive stages. Jesus himself spoke of the kingdom of God as moving out of the stage of the blade into that of the ear and finally into that of the full corn in the ear. This illustration is our warrant for insisting that in the enforcing of truth all manner of factors come into play and that the truth passes through successive epochs, some of which may seem to later believers very unpromising and unworthy. The test of the worth of an idea is not so much any opinion as to the unseemliness of the stages through which it has passed as it is the value of the idea when once it has come to ripeness. The test of the grain is its final value for food. The scriptural truths are to be judged by no other test than that of their worth for life. In the light of the teaching of Jesus himself there is no reason why we should shrink from stating that the revelation of biblical truth is influenced by even the moral limitations of men. Jesus said that an important revelation to man was halted at an imperfect stage because of the hardness of men's hearts. The Mosaic law of divorce was looked upon by Jesus as inadequate. The law represented the best that could be done with hardened hearts. The author of the Practice of Christianity, a book published anonymously some years ago, has shown conclusively how the hardness of men's hearts limits any sort of moral and spiritual revelation. It will be remembered that William James in discussing the openness of minds to truth divided men into the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." James was not thinking of moral distinctions: he was merely emphasizing the fact that tough-minded men require a different order of intellectual approach than do the tender-minded. If we put into tough-mindedness the element of moral hardness and unresponsiveness which the prophet must meet, we can see how such an element would condition and limit the prophet.