Authority is sacred, when experience affords parallels and analogies. If much which may overwhelm when it shall happen can be foreseen, the prescient statesman and moralist may provide defensive measures to break the waters, whose streams they cannot always direct; and the venerable Hooker has profoundly observed, that “the best things have been overthrown, not so much by puissance and might of adversaries, as through defect of council in those that should have upheld and defended the same.”[196]
The philosophy of history blends the past with the present, and combines the present with the future: each is but a portion of the other! The actual state of a thing is necessarily determined by its antecedent, and thus progressively through the chain of human existence; while “the present is always full of the future,” as Leibnitz has happily expressed the idea.
A new and beautiful light is thus thrown over the annals of mankind, by the analogies and the parallels of different ages in succession. How the seventeenth century has influenced the eighteenth; and the results of the nineteenth as they shall appear in the twentieth, might open a source of predictions, to which, however difficult it might be to affix their dates, there would be none in exploring into causes, and tracing their inevitable effects.
The multitude live only among the shadows of things in the appearances of the present; the learned, busied with the past, can only trace whence and how all comes; but he who is one of the people, and one of the learned, the true philosopher, views the natural tendency and terminations which are preparing for the future!
[179] See Rushworth, vol. i. p. 420. His language was decisive.
[180] This letter is in the works of Æneas Sylvius; a copious extract is given by Bossuet, in his “Variations.” See also Mosheim, Cent. xiii. part ii. chap. 2, note m.
[181] Though it cannot be positively asserted it is generally believed that the author was Robert Longlande, a monk of Malvern. See introduction to Wright’s edition of “The Vision.” The latter part of the year 1362 is believed to be the time of its composition.
[182] The passage is so remarkable as to be worth giving here, for the immediate reference of such readers as may not have ready access to the original. We modernize the spelling from Mr. Wright’s edition:—
| But there shall come a king, And confess you religious, And award you as the Bible telleth For breaking of your rule. **** And then shall the Abbot of Abingdon And all his issue for ever, Have a knock of a king, And incurable the wound. |