its
expounders. Hooker indeed seemed to have done what no predictor of
events should do; he fixed on the period of its accomplishment. In 1597
he declared that it would "peradventure fall out to be threescore and
ten years, or if strength do awe, into fourscore." Those who had
outlived the revolution in 1641, when the long parliament pulled down
the ecclesiastical establishment, and sold the church-lands--a
circumstance which Hooker had contemplated--and were afterwards returned
to their places on the Restoration, imagined that the prediction had not
yet been completed, and were looking with great anxiety towards the year
1677, for the close of this extraordinary prediction! When Bishop
Barlow, in 1675, was consulted on it, he endeavoured to dissipate the
panic, by referring to an old historian, who had reproached our nation
for their proneness to prophecies![194] The prediction of the venerable
Hooker in truth had been fully accomplished, and the event had occurred
without Bishop Barlow having recurred to it; so easy it seems to forget
what we dislike to remember! The period of time was too literally taken,
and seems to have been only the figurative expression of man's age in
scriptural language which Hooker had employed; but no one will now deny
that this prescient sage had profoundly foreseen the results of that
rising party, whose designs on church and state were clearly depicted in
his own luminous view.

The philosophical predictor, in foretelling a crisis from the appearance
of things, will not rashly assign the period of time; for the crisis
which he anticipates is calculated on by that inevitable march of events
which generate each other in human affairs; but the period is always
dubious, being either retarded or accelerated by circumstances of a
nature incapable of entering into this moral arithmetic. It is probable
that a revolution similar to that of France would have occurred in this
country, had it not been counteracted by the genius of Pitt. In 1618 it
was easy to foretell by the political prognostic that a mighty war
throughout Europe must necessarily occur. At that moment, observes
Bayle, the house of Austria aimed at a universal monarchy; the
consequent domineering spirit of the ministers of the Emperor and the
King of Spain, combined with their determination to exterminate the new
religion, excited a reaction to this imperial despotism; public opinion
had been suppressed, till every people grew impat