period of the life of any individual, much less his destiny?
May not the life of the nation be as liable to accidents and diseases as
that of the individual?

But the claim has been actually made, that the skillful statesman, or
philosophic observer, is able to foresee, and foretell, even such
accidents. Dean Stanley quotes Mill as suggesting an ordinary sign of
statesmanship in modern times: "To have made predictions often verified
by the event, seldom or never falsified by it."

Others give a still wider range to prophetic inspiration. They tell us
that all genius is prophetic, inasmuch as it grasps general laws,
universal in their range, and unvariable in their operation, the
application of which to particular events constitutes prediction. The
Hebrew prophets were sagacious observers of human nature, and made very
shrewd calculations of the future progress of events by a careful
induction of the invariable laws of nature from the history of the past.
But there was nothing supernatural in that. Every poet, philosopher, and
statesman is more or less of a prophet. Indeed foresight, like insight,
is common to all men: a superior degree of this common possession
constitutes the prophet. Men of profound insight, or of extensive
foresight, are equally rare in all departments of science. Ignorance
ascribes to supernatural inspiration the sagacity derived from extensive
observation of nature and history; while philosophy traces to the same
source the inspiration of Moses and Mohammed, of Isaiah and Apollo, of
the Principia, Paradise Lost, and the Apocalypse, of Rothschild,
Napoleon, and Bismarck. Some geniuses expend themselves in poems, some
in paintings, others in predictions. All are alike imperfect and
fallible. Once in centuries, perhaps, we are astonished by the advent of
a master, while occasional less perfect attempts and shrewd guesses keep
the fires of ambition alive in the human breast.

But if this were a correct account of the case we should have our best
prophets as the result of our widest observations of nature and history;
the best should come last. The prophets of this nineteenth century
should be far ahead of Moses in prophetic foresight, standing as they do
on the summit of the observatory built by the experience of forty
centuries. Whereas, as a matter of fact, the world knows nothing about
these modern prophets, or their predictions. The instances alleged by
Rationalists are contemptibly trivial when