[Sidenote: Prediction of future contingents, not always prophecy.] When by prophecy is meant prediction, or foretelling of future contingents; not only they were prophets, who were God’s spokesmen, and foretold those things to others, which God had foretold to them; but also all those impostors, that pretend, by help of familiar spirits, or by superstitious divination of events past, from false causes, to foretel the like events in time to come: of which, as I have declared already in the twelfth chapter of this discourse, there be many kinds, who gain in the opinion of the common sort of men, a greater reputation of prophecy, by one casual event that may be but wrested to their purpose, than can be lost again by never so many failings. Prophecy is not an art, nor, when it is taken for prediction, a constant vocation; but an extraordinary, and temporary employment from God, most often of good men, but sometimes also of the wicked. The woman of Endor, who is said to have had a familiar spirit, and thereby to have raised a phantasm of Samuel, and foretold Saul his death, was not therefore a prophetess; for neither had she any science, whereby she could raise such a phantasm; nor does it appear that God commanded the raising of it; but only guided that imposture to be a means of Saul’s terror and discouragement, and by consequent, of the discomfiture by which he fell. And for incoherent speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of prophecy, because the prophets of their oracles, intoxicated with a spirit or vapour from the cave of the Pythian oracle at Delphi, were for the time really mad, and spake like madmen; of whose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of _materia prima_. In Scripture I find it also so taken (_1 Sam._ xviii. 10) in these words, _And the evil spirit came upon Saul, and he prophecied in the midst of the house_. [Sidenote: The manner how God hath spoken to the prophets.]