SECULAR PROPHECY. 735 



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 mis- 

 leading, because the same set of conditions does not appear at two 

 different times, and an almost unseen element might suffice to deter- 

 mine an all-important event. Forgetting this fact, Archbishop Man- 

 ning 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 au- 

 thority. 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 Man- 

 ning's prophecy is a conspicuous example of a false inference. When 

 he argues that a pope in the nineteenth century will again be the tem- 

 poral 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 con- 

 fidently 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 cur- 

 rent 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 



