Prophecy cannot be inherited. It is currency which can only be spent, not invested. It cannot be passed from generation to generation preserved in Church Order or a theological system or volumes of sermons. It is a God-given faculty for seeing the heart of a particular age. We can no more preserve or reincarnate it in a situation remote from its time than we could recapture the jubilation of victory of Trafalgar or the Horror of the Great Plague. When we try, we are smothered in debris — dogma as the corpse of dead prophecy, the husk of an institutional Church, the left-overs of someone else’s party, the faded notes of someone else’s sermon.¹