Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/753

Rh if the prophecies were let off in the dark and at random; but that is not the case. It is easy to trace the path along which the mind of Heine or De Tocqueville travelled to the results of the future, and their predictions betray nothing more wonderful than a rare power of drawing correct inferences from confused facts. A set of general rules might be laid down as a guide to prophecy. In the first place, we might give the negative caution that the analogy of past events is misleading, because the same set of conditions does not appear at two different times, and an almost unseen element might suffice to determine an all-important event. Forgetting this fact, Archbishop Manning has ventured into the field of prophecy with the argument that Catholics should not be made uneasy because the pope has lost his temporal power, for they should remember that he has again and again suffered worse calamities, and has then won back all his old authority. Between 1378 and 1418 the Church witnessed the scandal of a schism, in which there were rival popes, and in which Home and Avignon competed for the mastery. That calamity is worse than any which has come to the Church in our days, yet the Papacy regained its old power and glory. So late as within the present century the temporal power was reduced to nullity by the first Napoleon, and Pius IX. himself had to flee from Rome in the beginning of his reign. Why, then, should not the robber-band of Victor Emmanuel be paralyzed in turn, and the Papacy once more regain its old splendor? Not being ambitious to play the part of prophets, we do not undertake to say whether the Papacy will or will not again climb or be flung into its ancient place, but it is not the less certain that Archbishop Manning's prophecy is a conspicuous example of a false inference. When he argues that a pope in the nineteenth century will again be the temporal ruler of Rome because a pope triumphed over the schism of Avignon in the fifteenth, he forgets that the lapse of centuries has wrought a vast change of conditions. At the end of the fourteenth century a keen onlooker, a Heine or a De Tocqueville, might have confidently foretold that a pope of unquestioned authority would soon govern the historic city of the Papacy, because the political and the social interests of Europe, no less than the piety or superstition of the times, required that the pope should be powerful and free. The current of the age, if we may use the philosophical slang, was running from Avignon to Rome in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and now the current of the age is not less distinctly running against the temporal power. The very reasons which would have led a prophet in 1400 to predict that Rome would again be the unquestioned seat of the Papacy would lead the same soothsayer to affirm in 1873 that the temporal power has been shattered forever.

It is in general causes that we find the guide of prophecy. Mr. Buckle attached so much importance to the physical conditions of a country, the food of a people, the air they breathe, the occupations