After the commencement of the French Revolution, Lord Mansfield was once asked when it would end? His Lordship replied, “It is an event without precedent, and therefore without prognostic.” The fact is, however, that it had both; as our own history, in the reign of Charles the First, had furnished us with a precedent; and the prognostics were so plentiful, that a volume of passages might be collected from various writers who had foretold it.
There is a production, which does honour to the political sagacity, as well as to his knowledge of human nature, thrown out by Bishop Butler in a Sermon before the House of Lords, in 1741; he calculated that the unreligious spirit would produce, some time or other, political disorders, similar to those which, in the 17th century, had arisen from religious fanaticism. “Is there no danger,” he observed, “that all this may raise somewhat like that levelling spirit, upon Atheistical principles, which in the last age prevailed upon enthusiastic ones? Not to speak of the possibility that different sorts of people may unite in it upon these contrary principles!” All this has literally been accomplished!
If a prediction be raised on facts which our own prejudice induce us to infer will exist, it must be chimerical. The Monk Carron announces in his Chronicle, printed in 1532, that the world was about ending, as well as his Chronicle of it; that the Turkish Empire would not last many years; that after the death of Charles V. the Empire of Germany would be torn to pieces by the Germans themselves. This Monk will no longer pass for a prophet; he belongs to that class of Chroniclers who write to humour their own prejudices, like a certain Lady-prophetess who, in 1811, predicted that grass was to grow in Cheapside about this time!
Even when the event does not always justify the prediction, the predictor may not have been the less correct in his principles of divination. The catastrophe of human life, and the turn of great events, often turn out accidental. Marshal Biron, whom we have noticed, might have ascended the throne instead of the scaffold; Cromwell and De Retz might have become only the favourite generals, or the ministers of their Sovereigns. Fortuitous events are not included within the reach of human prescience; such must be consigned to those vulgar superstitions which presume to discover the issue of human events, without pretending to any human knowledge. In the science of the Philosopher there is nothing supernatural.
Predictions have sometimes been condemned as false ones, which, when scrutinize may scarcely be deemed to have failed: they may have been accomplished, and they may again revolve on us. In 1749, Dr. Hartley published his “Observations on Man;” and predicted the fall of the existing governments and hierarchies, in two simple propositions; among others—
Prop. 81. It is probable that all the civil governments will be overturned.
Prop. 82. It is probable that the present forms of Church government will be dissolved.
Many indeed were terribly alarmed at these predicted falls of Church and State. Lady Charlotte Wentworth asked Hartley when these terrible things would happen? The answer of the predictor was not less awful: “I am an old man, and shall not live to see them.” In the subsequent revolutions of America and France, and perhaps latterly that of Spain, it can hardly be denied that these predictions have failed.
The philosophical predictor, in foretelling some important crisis, from the appearances of things, will not rashly assign the period of time; for the crisis he anticipates is calculated on by that inevitable march of events which generate each other in human affairs; but the period is always dubious, being either retarded or accelerated by circumstances of a nature incapable of entering into his moral arithmetic. There is, however, a spirit of political vaccination which presumes to pass beyond the boundaries of human prescience, which, by enthusiasts, has often been ascribed to the highest source of inspiration; but since “the language of prophecy” has ceased, such pretensions are not less impious than they are unphilosophical. No one possessed a more extraordinary portion of this awful prophetic confidence than Knox the reformer: he appears to have predicted several remarkable events, and the fates of some persons. We are informed that when condemned to a galley in Rochelle, he predicted that “within two or three years, he should preach the Gospel at St. Giles’s, in Edinburgh,” an improbable event, which nevertheless happened as he had foretold. Of Mary and Darnley, he pronounced that, “as the King, for the Queen’s pleasure, had gone to mass, the Lord, in his justice, would make her the instrument of his overthrow.” Other striking predictions of the deaths of Thomas Maitland, and of Kirkaldly of Grange, and the warning he solemnly gave to the Regent Murray, not to go to Linlithgow, where he was assassinated, occasioned a barbarous people to imagine that the prophet Knox had received an immediate communication from heaven.
An Almanack-maker, a Spanish friar, predicted, in clear and precise words, the death of Henry the Fourth of France; and Pierese, though he had no faith in the vain science of Astrology, yet, alarmed at whatever menaced the life of a beloved Sovereign, consulted with some of the King’s friends, and had the Spanish almanack before his Majesty, who courteously thanked them for their solicitude, but utterly slighted the prediction: the event occurred, and in the following year the Spanish friar spread his own fame in a new almanack. This prediction of the Spanish friar was the result either of his being acquainted with the plot, or from his being made an instrument for the purposes of those who were. It appears that Henry’s assassination was rife in Spain and Italy before the event occurred.