PROPHECY AND PREDICTION.
ACORRESPONDENT reverts in another column to the prophecies of the Irish Archbishop, St. Malachi, with reference to the names and characters of successive Popes. We shall not enter into this curious question of St. Malachi beyond pointing out that some at least of the prophecies were of so general a character that, no matter what the facts were, it was easy to make the prophecies fit them. Leo XIII. is lamen de exio, but of how many Popes might that as well have been said ? Our correspondent thinks that, "with the starlight in his eyes," Leo XIII. is peculiarly entitled to the description, "light from heaven." But there are other Popes who have had brilliant eyes, and the heavenly light might be of a purely spiritual character, quite unexpressed in any bodily organ. "Probable conjectures," as Bacon says, "many times turn themselves into prophecies," which is the most likely explanation of the apparent fulfilment of the predictions of Zadkiel and of other almanac-makers. We cannot see, in short, in the St. Malachi predictions anything in the nature of true prophecy.
We ought, once for all, to distinguish clearly between prophecy and prediction, two facts often confounded but which are widely separated from one another. A prediction is a statement that a certain definite fact or event will happen in the future of which the ordinary man is wholly ignorant, and concerning which the person who predicts has no obvious source of information. If a man were to assert that on May 1st, 1901, Rome would be engulfed by an earthquake which would take place at nine in the morning, and that exactly five-sixths of the population would be destroyed, and that the Vatican, we will say, would alone remain out of all the mass of buildings in the city, and if that event came to pass exactly in every detail as foretold, we should call such a statement a prediction. But if, on the other hand, a man were to denounce the state of things in Rome, to rebuke the Roman Curia for worldliness and intrigue, to cen- sure the Government for injustice and neglect of the poor, and were to add that such policy must bring Nemesis, and that divine judgment would surely over- take this wrong-doing before long in the form of internal revolution or foreign invasion, and this happened, we should call a foretelling of that kind a prophecy, not a prediction. Of this latter character were the great Hebrew prophecies. The prophets of Israel were not soothsayers or conjurors who could do something merely wonderful or striking, they were men of unusual moral insight who saw that the divine laws were sure in their operation, and that wickedness, however concealed or however apparently successful, must result in rain. This power of spiritual divination made of the prophets, as Mill, following M. Salvador, said, a permanent political opposition ; but an opposition which, unlike our political parties, was influenced only by moral aims, and which never desired to take office. While the priesthood represented the routine side of the national life of Israel, the prophets repre- sented the side of spontaneity and the effort at national renewal. The prophet was an analogue of the great spiritual poet,—of Dante, Milton, Wordsworth. He penetrated into the heart of life's mystery, he saw the vision of the soul in its silent and secluded home where "mountains surround it and pellucid air." Indeed, the grandest Hebrew poetry is con- tained in the greater prophets, so that we may say that in these great seers the poet and the prophet were combined ; their prophetic souls "dreaming on things to come" being able to express themselves in stately language and glowing imagery. Think of Milton surrounded by the Comas rout of the Restoration, or of Dante by the sinners of Florence, and you have a more modern picture of Isaiah, Ezekiel, or Hosea. In a word, prophecy is not a knowledge of signs and wonders, but an insight into the inevitable laws of the soul.
If we are to accept the very reasonable conclusions of Mr. Lang as regards animism, we might say that while prophecy was concerned with that original moral sense which recog- nised a divine Creator and found the chief duty of man to consist in obeying His laws, prediction has rather been asso- ciated with animism or ancestor-worship, forming part of the miraculous and wonderful side of life which so impresses the gaping crowd. Tell a man that his will can be purified and his intellect ennobled, and he will scarcely listen to you; but tell him that a saint's blood liquefies once a year, and he will travel many leagues to see the miracle. It was this tendency which seemed to produce a divine impatience even in the breast of Christ. "You look for events in the sky," He says, "but will not discern the signs of the times." A passion for miracles, but blindness to the moral law,—it vans all through history. But it has been pointed out by Mr. Lang that the whole course of the higher Hebrew teach- ing was directed towards a noble Theism and against animism, against resorting to wizards who held communication with the dead. The reality of that communication, be it observed, is not denied; nay, the story of the Witch of Endor implies its validity. The wizard could, in the Hebrew belief, convey information which was not to be obtained by normal means, and that information had reference naturally in the main to events yet to come. In a word, the wizard was one who predicted, whose predictions were generally held to be accurate, and yet who, under the Mosaic law, was not suffered to live. How different the Greeks, who were strongly possessed by animism ! Scarce a journey was made or an important task undertaken without a previous visit to a shrine to consult the oracle for the purpose of ob- taining knowledge of the future. That desire to know the future dominated the pagan mind generally, and led to the multiplication of shrines and of oracular utterances, which ultimately became as purely conjectural and manufactured products as the " tipster's " calculations in a sporting news- paper. This craze for prediction is quite consistent with the highest external culture; since Horace depicts for us the soothsayer in the streets of Rome in the Augustan age, while the veriest quackery found high patrons in Paris on the very eve of the French Revolution. We do not profess to "explain" predictions, of which Bacon says with truth that "men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss"; but we should be inclined to say that in their origin there may have been a kernel of genuine knowledge, improperly ob- tained, if we are to accept the moral guidance of the prophets of Israel, who sternly reprobated all practices that issued from animism, deprecated signs and wonders, and urged men to make their moral being their prime care. Materialism once rejected, we do not see how it can be denied that men may have had communicated to them by unseen agency special and peculiar forms of knowledge. We are, at any rate, certain that the spiritual instinct of Israel was right in dissuading men from becoming like unto gods, and that the Greekmind suffered from its reliance on oracles. The "demon" of Socrates, the inner light which warned him against a wrong step, was a kind of rebuke to his fellow-countrymen in their reliance on the external. On this probably true animistic stem was of course grafted the delusive element which, acting either by positive trickery or by information subtly but quite normally obtained (as in the case of the Egyptian priesthood), could easily rise to the level of pre- dictions that, calculated over a long period, would in
the mass of cases prove correct, or at least correct enough for popular consumption, on Bacon's principle of marking the hits and ignoring the misses. Remember that predictions have usually been vague, and that in not a few cases the event which happened has been referred back to the prediction, instead of the event being clearly foreseen when the prediction was uttered. It is often so easy to see in some contemporary occurrence the fulfilment of a generalisation uttered years or generations before. We conclude, therefore, that of the vast mass of predictions recorded in history, a few were possibly true, and were b ised on some kind of abnormal knowledge; that a great number were the outcome of subtle priestly or political devices to gain hold over the popular mind ; and that the large residuum have been gross and palpable deceit. We also hold that not only are prediction and prophecy quite distinct, but that they are in their nature opposed. The prophet is not only no soothsayer, but he is the deadly enemy of the power that would divert from the quest of the inward and moral law the forces of the intellect and the soul.
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