Mahometanism in its Relation to Prophecy/Preface
From the earliest dawn of human history we find mankind striving, though for the most part in vain, to lift up the curtain that hangs before the future, to obtain some glimpse of what is to come.
There was nothing unnatural in this; the past had fled away, and with it that feeling which its actual presence had inspired. The present no sooner arrived than it was gone, it did nothing but swell the recollection of what had previously passed away. No doubt the past must ever occupy a large portion of human thought; a human faculty has been created to exercise itself upon it the memory: and as we dwell upon it we feel in turn joy or sorrow, remorse or satisfaction, hope or fear. It contains, as Revelation assures us, the catalogue of those acts, which, whether good or bad, are to decide our future and everlasting destiny. The past then in its own nature must exert a stronger influence over the human mind, and excite deeper feelings, than the present ever can. For the past is nothing else but the whole collection of numberless instants, that once were present for a moment, and then for ever ceased: though, awful mystery! their consequences are eternal and for ever present! But if the past naturally and necessarily exercises so large an influence on the feelings of men, what must be the intensity of interest that belongs in every thoughtful mind to the consideration of the future?
The future contains within its fathomless and boundless bosom our own destiny, our own lot for good or evil, for weal or woe: it contains the sum and the result of more than all that lies buried in the past; it contains those brief instants still reserved for each of us, that will soon be present, and then become the apanage of the past; but it contains far more, it contains the moral and physical results of all these little present instants, and of the use which we shall make of them. It contains the solution of the great mystery of human creation, of the relation of man to his Maker, of time to eternity, of what changes and passes away to what shall never more change, but shall endure in God and with God for ever and ever, world without end! O wonderful and overwhelming thought! O who will grant us rightly to estimate the great thought of the future? It is evident that for the human mind to dwell upon the future is not only a necessary result of the order of God, strictly according to the nature of things, but the highest duty and interest of man, strictly reasonable, inasmuch as it relates to what in its own nature is far more important, than anything that is present, or even the whole assemblage of what is recorded in the history of the past.
And yet this great and all-absorbing future is an impenetrable mystery, which no human mind can fathom. We are irresistibly drawn to the thought of it, but we cannot see to the end of it; we wander and wonder upon its dreary shore, as we may on that of the ocean, but our eye is soon perplexed and dazzled, our mind reels and falters, and we turn away from an impossible task, not to be accomplished by the most powerful understanding, or the deepest calculations of human reason. And yet, as we turn away, an unseen force drives us once more to the same margin.
This unseen force, what is it, but God? and He, who urges us, provides what is to satisfy the feeling He Himself has called forth within us. The limited mind of the creature cannot know what is in the future; but God, in whom all that is, lives, and moves, and has its being, God knows what is in the future, because He knows, and must know, all things. Man may guess some of the things that are in the future, because, reasoning from what has passed, he may calculate upon certain results springing from certain causes ; but he can never do more than guess, because he never can tell how the causes he calculates from may themselves be changed. But if man can guess, and if sometimes the result will bear out the accuracy of the guess, God, who knows all the secret springs and bearings of all that He has created, God must know all the results of the working of His own work, with even a much greater certainty than the watchmaker knows what will be the practical practical result of his own mechanical contrivances. And this must be so, no matter what be the mechanism (if I may use such a word) employed by the Almighty Creator. In a word, if a part of this mechanism be what is termed free will, that is, a power vested by its Maker in the creature of acting according to or against His own Divine will, which power, He assures us, was granted to the creature for a moral purpose, namely, for rendering it fit or unfit to be hereafter associated with Himself; if such a power, as this were part of the mechanism employed by the Almighty Creator in the construction of the rational creature, that would no more hinder the Creator from certainly foreknowing the consequences and results of His own mechanism, than any mechanism invented by a human artificer could baffle the accuracy of the inventor's calculations.
God, then, knows all things, whether past or future; man is ignorant of the future, but he feels himself urged on to the consideration of it. What is he to do? From the earliest moments of human history God Himself has given us an answer to the question, in revealing to men from time to time the secrets of the future. Sometimes these revelations, or prophecies (as we call them), have come direct from God, sometimes through the instrumentality of inspired men, that is, of men speaking as the mouthpieces of God Himself. No sooner had Adam and Eve transgressed the probationary commandment of God in Eden, than the Almighty revealed to them the greatest of all events that lay buried in the future, the coming of a Redeemer who should atone for their fault; while very soon after we find the Almighty making known other portions of the future through the instrumentality of such men as Enoch and Noah, till it pleased His Divine goodness to raise up a succession of prophets, by whose ministry He announced to mankind all the principal events in human history, even until the very end of the world, that is, until the consummation of the probationary condition of men; for it is from prophecy, and from prophecy alone, that we know that the present state of the human race will one day cease, and be replaced with another which is to be far better for all those who shall be made fit for it, while the misery of all the rest will be equally perfect in its kind, and, like the happiness of the redeemed, everlasting.
To satisfy, then, the cravings of mankind to dive into the future, God has given prophecy, and, like every other Divine gift, we ought to receive it with thankfulness and humility. It is no part of our present object to discuss the question of true as distinguished from apocryphal prophecy, or even that of the general test of true prophecies; we assume throughout the truth of the prophecies recorded in the Bible, and accepted by all Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant. We say, then, that God having given such a gift as prophecy, it is clear that He intended us to make use of it, and to profit by it; else we may surely infer the gift would not have been bestowed. Under this conviction, we find that good men in all ages of the Church, both before and after the coming of our Saviour, have made prophecy the subject of their studies, while they endeavoured by means of its light to read the purposes of God in what was passed and accomplished, as well as to enter into those same Divine purposes in what still remained as yet unfulfilled. (See 1 Peter i. 1012.)
The history of the heathen world reveals a similar feeling amongst all nations; the oracles of their false divinities were indeed a poor counterfeit of the prophecies of the true God; still they did homage to a great principle, and bore witness to the fact how eagerly men dive into the future, while they proved the necessity of true prophecies. Amongst the heathen there remained also a large store of the ancient true prophecies along with that portion of other Divine truths, which they still retained, obscured and corrupted as they were by their own vain reasonings and erroneous traditions.
But amongst the people of God, whether under the Mosaic or the Christian dispensations, the most eminent lights of the Church have ever turned their minds to the consideration of prophecy, and in proportion to the magnitude of the events in the sphere of which they were placed, have they striven to examine the relations between such events and prophecy. And assuredly they were right in doing so. No doubt they were often mistaken in their application of particular prophecies to particular events; and yet their labours contributed to the sum of general interpretation, which (it must be acknowledged) is singularly uniform in its conclusions, if due allowance be made for natural divergencies upon particular details. Thus, 'to give an example, it is quite remarkable what a unity there is amongst commentators upon the Little Horn describe d by Daniel as growing out of the Grecian beast! Even Protestants agree with Catholics in the Misinterpretation of this portion of prophecy. And so with other portions also, as we shall have occasion to see hereafter. And though, at the moment, in the application of particular prophecies to particular events, great mistakes may very naturally be made, still it will be found that there was much that was valuable connected with the labours, even of those who blundered in some of their conclusions, inasmuch as they laid down principles of interpretation, which others afterwards found to be of the greatest value, not only in ascertaining truth, but in rectifying their blunders. And as an instance of what I mean, I should say that the most powerful arguments to disprove the Protestant theory that the pope was the fulfilment of prophecy as relating to Antichrist, have come to me from the very writings of Protestant commentators, which undertook to establish the soundness of this very theory.
So also students of prophecy may have erred in supposing that the events of their own day had any place at all in prophecy, at least any distinct and definite place, and yet that ought not discourage others from considering other events in their possible relation to prophecy. The only conclusion, that it seems to me may be fairly drawn from any such past failures of interpretation, is, not that we should not endeavour to find out any such relation between what is going on in the world and prophecy; but that, in our labours to attain this, we should act with great caution and humility, and abstain from all dogmatizing assurance, simply stating our opinion, and the reasons on which it is grounded: leaving it to God and to the future to do the rest: moreover bearing in mind the words of the Apostle Peter, "That no prophecy of Scripture is made by private interpretation" (2 Peter i. 20.)
These few observations we felt we owed to our readers as preliminary to our entering on the very interesting question, as to the possible relation that may exist between the Divine prophecies of the Holy Scripture and the great events that are now taking place all over the earth, and that seem likely to usher in others of still greater magnitude.
But in all our observations on this most interesting subject, we here declare that we submit all that we have written to the infallible authority of our Holy Mother, the Catholic and Apostolic Church, to whom alone belongs the true interpretation of Divine Scripture.