History and biography show that individuals have time and again, been admonished by their assiduous friends of evils or calamities that were to befall them, yet the admonition, though timely given, seldom enabled them to avoid their fate. Men have been warned of murderous assaults, but they have not evaded them; premonitions have been given of falling buildings, and these have fallen, involving in their destruction the loss of the individual’s life at the precise date which his dream foreshadowed.
The time will come in the far future when man will understand prophecy as a science. There are few persons living at the present day, who, looking back upon their past history, would conscientiously wish it had been all revealed to them at the outset of their career.
The withered, faded beauty, at the dawn of her life of youthful triumph could not have endured a vision of the haggard unfortunate wretch which she would represent in the course of a few years.
These remarks apply more especially to the so-called civilized state of society at the present day.
The semi-barbarous nations, so termed, are in closer sympathy with nature. Life and death, prosperity and adversity, are to them as natural effects as the sunshine and rain of the terrestrial globe.
Their equanimity, their perfect repose upon the bosom of nature, causes them to see more clearly into the future than do civilized nations. There is a spirit of prophecy which does not comprehend the detail, and only takes cognizance of the grand events of life.
This prophetic condition is attainable by every being in a certain state of exaltation.
The poet, the painter, the statesman, the preacher, can alike in moments of ecstasy ascend this mount of inspiration, and foretell the advancement of the world in relation to art, science, and spiritual development. But the oracle, the sybil of the East can penetrate a height beyond and above this mount, and can perceive the detail of an individual life in its minutest events.
The Bible prophecy which foretold that “knowledge should cover the earth, even as the waters cover the sea,” and that “the wilderness should blossom as the rose,” was given in an ecstatic vision, and was simply a spiritual comprehension of the power of soul over matter.
As a knowledge of distance is relative, a keen perception on the part of the prophet revealed to him, as he beheld the birds soaring in air, that the journey to lands beyond the sea was no greater distance to those winged creatures than a few miles would be to him. The prophecy Isaiah made more than eighteen hundred years ago, is fulfilled to-day. Science has annihilated space; knowledge becomes universal, and the wilderness disappears.