PROPHECIES FOR THE PRESENT.
Prophecies and miracles, we are told, have long since ceased upon the earth, as permitted only, by Divine goodness, to those ages when faith was not firmly established, and revelation needed the active and visible interference of Divine influence to make its way into the heart of obstinate and denying man. This is a doctrine which, in these present times of reason, we are naturally inclined to accept. But yet there are circumstances, occurring even in our day, which sometimes surprise the imagination, and even startle that reason which is so ready to assert its supremacy. It is thus that we have regarded with much curiosity, more wonder, and an impression which it is difficult to drive away from our minds, certain strange documents relative to the most important events of modern history, which, if their authenticity be accepted, are among the most striking revelations emanating from a prophetic spirit. They appear before us avowed prophecies, coming from seemingly well-authenticated sources, and backed by such assurances in the genuineness of their antiquity, from credible mouths, as takes off from them that paulo-post-future sort of suspicion, that inevitably attaches itself to predictions, which make their appearance to the world after fulfilment. In laying them before our readers, we are able to offer some little proof, as far as it goes, in support of their authenticity; and we still call to them the attention of those who may nevertheless refuse their credence, as highly interesting documents of a strange character, relating to past, present, and even future political events. As they do, in truth, refer also to a future still to be accomplished, as well as to the present, our readers, it is to be hoped, may be able to judge for themselves how far the predictions as to the future will bear out those which now already relate to the past, and to what, if such an expression may be pardoned, might be called the present just gone by.
Two of these revelations bear the character of direct and avowed prophecies, given as such by holy men, and are imbued throughout with that mystic spirit, which, however incomprehensible as regards the future, becomes clear to an extraordinary degree of distinctness when applied to the test of the past: they wear, in fact, the strange air of predictions never intended to be comprehended until after their fulfilment; as if, even although the inspired soul of certain individual men had been permitted to raise itself, in its ecstasy, from the earth into those unknown realms where past and future are confounded in eternity, and shake off for the time the mortal trammels of our limited understanding, but retain still afterwards the consciousness and the power to reveal what there it saw; yet, by some mysterious dispensation, the revelations should not be allowed to be expounded in the clearness of their truth, so as to be comprehensible to the intellects of the uninspired and undeserving herd. Why, then, should the future be revealed, it might be asked, if the revelation should serve nothing to mankind? With such deep and awful mysteries we have not to deal: we cannot answer: we are of the blind who cannot lead the blind. At all events, if these documents be forgeries—mere devices fabricated after facts—and that they cannot be so entirely, will be seen hereafter—certainly a degree of genius that is almost incomprehensible presided over their fabrication, with this strange stamp of vague oracular language, which is only comprehensible in its after-application.
Such are two of these prophetic writings. As they are supposed to proceed from the mouths of religious men, renowned for the sanctity of their lives, they naturally refer more to the condition of the Christian church, and to the fate of the "faithful," than immediately to political events; but yet so closely is the destiny of the faithful of the Christian world mixed up inevitably with the destiny of men and countries in general, that the political events of our day are there set down in prediction, with all the minuteness which the vague and mystic language of prophetic revelation, dimly depicting what even the inspired eye can only dimly trace in cloudy vision, "through a glass darkly," is able to bestow upon detail. The third revelation assumes to be no more than an interpretation of the prophetical book of the New Testament, and repudiates all supposition of aiming at any spirit of prophecy in itself; a portion, however, of this interpretation of a part of Scripture so obscure as the book of the Revelation, is so remarkable in its application to present events, as to wear the very air of prophecy that its interpreter repudiates.
The longer and more important of the two prophecies, which have both appeared in France, and refer chiefly to events immediately connected with French history, is one popularly designated as the "Prophecy of Orval:" it has been already translated into English, and published,[12] with a preface, an introduction, and explanatory notes, chiefly referring to the authenticity of the document, and to its possession in the hands of a variety of credible and respectable persons during the whole of the present century, and some of the later years of the last. The little pamphlet has been got up with much intelligence, and apparently with a strictly conscientious spirit. We cannot here follow the editor through all the details he lays before us, to prove that the prophecy has been copied from a book printed at Luxembourg in the year 1544, and recopied, by gentlemen of standing and respectability, from copies already made, as early as the year 1792—or through all the evidence adduced, some years ago, in such respectable religious French papers as the Invariable, and the Propagateur de la Foi, accompanied by notes from the editor himself, with regard to his own personal experience, and the testimony he has received from personages worthy of the highest credit, known to himself. It may be said, however, that he communicates extracts of letters and other authorities, which, could they be forgeries, would assuredly be some of the most ingenious of the kind, even if they had any great end or aim in their fabrication; and it ought to be added, that a great part of this testimony is compiled from a brochure called The Oracle for 1840, and published by a certain Henry Dujardin in Paris, in the month of March 1840, consequently anterior, at all events, to the remarkable circumstances of the present day. On these matters we must refer our readers to the interesting little pamphlet itself. The authority upon which rests the fact that the prophecy, generally known under the title of "Les Prévisions d'Orval," and entitled "Certain Previsions revealed by God to a Solitary, for the Consolation of the Children of God," was actually printed at Luxembourg in the year 1544, seems every way as conclusive as possible in such matters of ancient lore; and the writer of this present paper has only to add that he himself has seen in Paris the whole prophecy, as far as it is still in existence, printed in a newspaper of the year 1839, (he believes, as far as his memory reaches, in the Journal des Villes et des Campagnes), and consequently, to his own knowledge, published to the world previously, at least, to the events of the present year; that an old English lady, upon whose faith he can implicitly rely, positively declared to him that she had it in her hands as early as the year 1802, and thus even before the crowning of Napoleon as Emperor; and that its reappearance, since the breaking out of the revolution of this year, excited so much sensation in the French capital, that measures were taken by the republican government of the day to establish a sort of surveillance over persons known to possess and propagate the prediction—a fact also mentioned by the editor of the English pamphlet—as conspirators against the stability of the republic. With these premises, we proceed to do no more than lay before our readers the prophecy in question, claiming for the notice that follows such credence as every man's conviction or scepticism, imagination or cooler reason, may choose to bestow.
The Abbey of Orval, from which the prediction has taken its title, was, it appears, a religious institution, situated in the diocese of Treves, on the frontiers of Luxembourg; and it is said that the abbot and the monks, when they fled from their convent, during the siege of Luxembourg by the French revolutionary army, to the "refuge" in the town, conveying a part of their archives as well as their sacred vessels with them, first communicated the printed copy of the Previsions of a Solitary of 1544 to Marshal Bender, who commanded the army, and other French gentlemen, by whom copies were then taken as a matter of curiosity, and put in circulation. Tradition at that time attributed the prediction to a monk of the name of Philip Olivarius, although the exact period of the existence of the "Solitary" does not appear to have been well known. What at present remains, or is supposed to remain, commences only with the history of Napoleon Buonaparte, although the "Oracle" of Henri Dujardin speaks of the prediction relative to the death of Louis XVI. as having excited considerable sensation among the emigrant circles of that time; and the circumstance of the absence of any events anterior to the prophecy, as it stands at present, is accounted for by a remark made in the Propagateur de la Foi, that, when it was discovered, at the conclusion of the last century, the copyists generally neglected to transcribe what related to the past, and contented themselves only with that portion, the accomplishment of which was still to come.
The prophecy, as will be seen, astoundingly and suspiciously minute in its details; but yet, when the predictions as to the future are considered—to our eyes at present so vague and mysterious, and still perhaps in their fulfilment, if so it should prove, as exact in detail,—it may well be imagined that the portions which now refer to the past, may in their day have appeared equally mysterious and vague. It runs as follows, as it now stands:—
"At that time a young man, come from beyond the sea into the country of Celtic Gaul, shows himself strong in counsel. But the mighty to whom he gives umbrage will send him to combat in the land of Captivity. Victory will bring him back. The sons of Brutus will be confounded at his approach, for he will overpower them, and take the name of emperor. Many high and mighty kings will be sorely afraid, for the eagle will carry off many sceptres and crowns. Men on foot and horse, carrying blood-stained eagles, and as numerous as gnats in the air, will run with him throughout Europe, which will be filled with consternation and carnage; for he will be so powerful, that God shall be thought to combat on his side. The church of God, in great desolation, will be somewhat comforted, for she shall see her temples opened again to her lost sheep, and God praised. But all is over, the moons are passed."
It must be remarked here, that the moons, continually alluded to in the prophecy, may be found, by the calculation of thirteen lunar mouths to a year, to arrive at an extraordinary accuracy of prediction as to the date of the events prophesied: those which have been mentioned above must be considered to refer probably to a period of time alluded to in the portion of the "Previsions" supposed to be lost.