Scripture texts illustrated by general literature

Why had Saul disquieted Samuel, to bring him up from the place of the dead, by the midnight agency of the “wise woman” of Endor? Because he would fain pry into futurity, and learn from supernatural sources his coming fate. The desired foresight was vouchsafed him. By to-morrow he and his sons were to be with the dead-and-gone seer, whose spirit he had rashly invoked. The prevision had its present penalty. “Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of Samuel.” The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, and only those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children. The tree of foreknowledge of good and evil may offer fruit that is pleasant to the sight, and seemingly to be desired to make one wise; but it is fatal food, not to be eaten of, nor to be touched, by any but the venturesome profane.

Indulged to his cost with previsions of what should befall his posterity, Milton’s Adam, at sight of the Flood and its ravages, breaks out into the exclamation,

Warned by so distressful an experience, he would have no man seek henceforth to be foretold what shall befall him or his children; “evil he may be sure, which neither his foreknowing can prevent; and he the future evil shall, no less in apprehension than in substance, feel grievous to bear.” It has been asked what would become of men, were their future absolutely foreknown by them: would they not become in imagination, and therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the bright colouring of hope? And yet,

So at least affirms the author of the “Rosciad,”—who in another of his writings puts the query:

Assuredly, says Cicero, the ignorance of evils to come is of more advantage than the knowledge of them: certe ignoratio futurorum malorum utilior est quam scientia. And Horace, in a celebrated passage:

Caliginosa nox forms a thick black curtain.

A thoughtful mind, sententiously observes Miss Clarissa Harlowe, is not a blessing to be coveted, unless it has such a happy vivacity with it as her friend Miss Howe’s: a vivacity which enables one to enjoy the present, without being anxious about the future. It is, according to Goldsmith, the happy confidence in bright illusions that gives life its true relish, and keeps up our spirits amidst every distress and disappointment. “How much less would be done, if a man knew how little he can do! How wretched a creature would he be, if he saw the end as well as the beginning of his projects! He would have nothing left but to sit down in torpid despair, and exchange enjoyment for actual calamity.” The warrior in Mr. Roscoe’s tragedy argues judiciously when he says,

Fortunately for us mortals, Mr. Froude says, necessary as any future may be, and inevitable as by our own actions we may have made it, it is kindly kept from us wrapt up in clouds, and we are not made wretched about it by anticipation. “O my fortune,” prays Agrippina, in one of Jonson’s Roman tragedies, “let it be sudden thou preparest against me; strike all my powers of understanding blind, and ignorant of destiny to come!”

Seek to know no more, is in vain the joint appeal of the three witches to Macbeth, beside the magic caldron in the cave; but as to the future of Banquo’s issue he will be satisfied. Cranmer, predicting a glorious reign for the infant Elizabeth, parenthesises a sigh on the common lot—

Shakspeare’s King Henry the Fourth, again, in one place utters the aspiration, “O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate!” Hardly an aspiration, however, as the context shows; a privilege to be deprecated rather; for could there be foreseen all the changes and chances of one’s mortal life, “how chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration with divers liquors,”

Mr. de Quincey describes an Installation of the Knights of St. Patrick at which he was present, during the Lord-Lieutenancy of Lord Cornwallis—the narrator’s companions on that occasion being Lord and Lady Castlereagh, who “were both young at this time, and both wore an impressive appearance of youthful happiness; neither, happily for their peace of mind, able to pierce that cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which divided them from the day destined in one hour to wreck the happiness of both.” Vision ill foreseen it were to know the times and the seasons, the manner how, and the place where.

The hermit in Scott’s “Talisman,” who, after failing to read aright the fate of others, has to own himself uncertain whether he may not have miscalculated his own,—withdraws from the action of the story with the reflection that God will not have us break into His council-house, or spy out His hidden mysteries. “We must wait His time with watching and prayer—with fear and with hope. I came hither the stern seer—the proud prophet, skilled, as I thought, to instruct princes, and gifted even with supernatural powers, but burdened with a weight which I deemed no shoulders but mine could have borne. But my bands have been broken! I go hence humble in mine ignorance,” etc. In Scott’s other and less popular Tale of the Crusaders, Eveline deprecates the Lady of Baldringham’s offer to show her niece how the balance of fate inclines, and shrinks from the asserted privilege “enjoyed” by their house of looking forward beyond the points of present time, and seeing in the very bud the thorns or flowers which are one day to encircle their head. “For my own sake, noble kinswoman,” answered Eveline, “I would decline such foreknowledge, even were it possible to acquire it without transgressing the rules of the Church. Could I have foreseen what has befallen me within these last unhappy days, I had lost the enjoyment of every happy moment before that time.” So again reasons the Italian adept, Baptista Damiotti, in one of Sir Walter’s shorter tales, when dismissing the two agitated ladies who have been consulting his magic mirror. “Few,” he added, in a melancholy tone, “leave this house as well in health as they entered it. Such being the consequence of seeking knowledge by mysterious means, I leave you to judge of the condition of those who have the power of gratifying such irregular curiosity.” Cowper observes in one of his letters that man often prophesies without knowing it; but that did he foresee, what is always foreseen by him who dictates what he supposes to be his own, he would suffer by anticipation as well as by consequence; and wish perhaps as ardently for the happy ignorance to which he is at present so much indebted, as some have foolishly and inconsiderately done, for a knowledge that would be but another name for misery. Even in the ecstasy of rapturous foresight the Seer exclaims,

When Harold and Haco, “pale king and dark youth,” in Lord Lytton’s historical novel, would read the riddle of the future, and “climb to heaven through the mysteries of hell,” the witch bids them—poor “worms”—crawl back to the clay—to the earth: “One such night as the hag ye despise enjoys as her sport and her glee, would freeze your veins, and sear the life in your eyeballs,” etc., etc. What says the wizard, again, in Tasso?

Cagliostro, professing to foresee the fate of La Perouse, is importunately asked by his fellow-guests at that memorable dinner-party commemorated by M. Dumas, why then he did not forewarn and save that brave man before setting out. At the very least, why not have told him to “beware of unknown isles”—that he might at any rate have had the chance of avoiding them? But, “I assure you no, count,” is the mystic’s reply; “and, if he had believed me, it would only have been the more horrible, for the unfortunate man would have seen himself approaching those isles destined to be fatal to him, without the power to escape from them. Therefore he would have died, not one, but a hundred deaths, for he would have gone through it all by anticipation. Hope, of which I should have deprived him, is what best sustains a man under all trials.” “Yes,” says Condorcet, the sceptical and sententious, “the veil which hides from us our future, is the only real good which God has vouchsafed to man.” And what again, to the same purport, says the Hermit Monk to Alpine’s Lord:—

And therefore, says Sir Thomas Browne, in his moralisings on the undesirableness of all such foresight, “and therefore the wisdom of astrologers, who speak of future things, hath wisely softened the severity of their doctrines; and even in their sad predictions, while they tell us of inclination not coaction from the stars, they kill us not with Stygian oaths and merciless necessity, but leave us hopes of evasion.” Tant mieux for those who, like Hudibras,

like Hudibras, bursting with the wish,

Vanity and vexation of spirit, these visionary previsions all. Sacred, therefore, be, in Thomson’s phrase, the veil that kindly clouds a light too keen for mortals,

In a feeling paragraph on the pains of a first separation, Miss Ferrier observes, or rather asks, if in the long and dreary interval that ensues, it were foreseen what griefs were to be borne, what ties severed, what hearts seared or broken—“who of woman born could bear the sight and live? But ’tis in mercy these things are hidden from our eyes.” Looking back upon a certain year’s accumulated troubles, Mrs. Gaskell’s Margaret Hale “wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them, how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time!” And yet day by day, it is explained, had of itself, and by itself, been very endurable—small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows. Margaret Hale does but exemplify in prose what Home’s Lady Randolph enunciates in sonorous verse:

Whereupon the lady’s faithful Anna remarks:

Not but that this doctrine has found special recusants, if too generally taken, or, in their own instance, too particularly applied. “I have somewhere read,” says Caleb Williams, “that Heaven in mercy hides from us the future incidents of our life. My own experience does not well accord with this assertion.” And mentioning one critical occasion, he adds, that this once at least he should have been saved from insupportable labour and indescribable anguish, could he have foreseen what was then impending.—Sometimes the natural complaint is like that of Duke Ferdinand in John Webster’s tragedy:

Sometimes a solace is found in such a reflection as this:

To be ignorant of evils to come, as well as forgetful of past, Sir Thomas Browne hails as a merciful provision of nature, “whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days.” In another of his works the fine old physician would have us, in the heyday of prosperity, “think of sullen vicissitudes,” but beat not our brains to foreknow them. “Be armed against such obscurities, rather by submission than fore-knowledge. The knowledge of future evils modifies present felicities, and there is more content in the uncertainty or ignorance of them. This favour our Saviour vouchsafed unto Peter, when he foretold not his death in plain terms, and so by an ambiguous and cloudy delivery damped not the spirit of His disciples. But in the assured fore-knowledge of the deluge, Noah lived many years under the affliction of a flood, and Jerusalem was taken unto Jeremy before it was besieged.” Holy George Herbert is scarcely more quaint in verse than Sir Thomas Browne in prose:

The assured knowledge of the exact minute of one’s death may be treated religiously as a privilege, after the manner of appeals by gaol-chaplains to condemned-cell criminals; as where the clergyman of the Tolbooth Church bade Wilson and Robertson, convicted Porteous rioters, not despair on account of the suddenness of the summons, “but rather to feel this comfort in their misery, that, though all who now [in that church] lifted the voice, or bent the knee in conjunction with them, lay under the same sentence of certain death, they only had the advantage of knowing the precise moment at which it should be executed upon them.” But how does Professor Henry Rogers treat the question, in its practical aspect, in his so-called “Vision about Prevision”? The seer, or foreseer, in that fantasiestück, when asked, concerning those who consult him as to the future, whether some at least do not wish to know the hour of their death—that they may duly prepare for it? answers, “That least of all. Not a soul will hear his tale told to the end; they won’t let us unveil to them the hour or the mode of their dissolution.... They prefer having a veil thrown over the closing scene of their life. Like other play-goers, they do not like death to be actually exhibited on the stage, and willingly let the curtain fall ere the catastrophe.” Well, but the seer himself: he at any rate is above that weakness: he at any rate has inquired into the secret of his end? “For what purpose?” is his reply: is not that knowledge the very misery of prisoners in the condemned cell? are they not accounted miserable precisely because they are to die just that day month? will not hundreds, who pity them for that very circumstance, in fact die before them? and yet are not these accounted happy in comparison, because they know it not?

says one philosophical poet. Another, and a greater, in a poem on presentiments, has this among many stanzas addressed to them:

that is the comment, that the note of exclamation, with which Wordsworth commences the stanza next ensuing. When death has invaded the quiet rectory in Miss Tytler’s Huguenot story, we have each servant mysteriously and fanatically delivering her experience in the matter of corpse-candles, death-spells, death-watches, etc., so that one might have learned for all one’s life afterwards to look on one’s death as a dark fate, haunting and hovering over one’s own person and those of beloved friends, from which there is no escape, not even by prayer and fasting; might have learned to “look out for it in dim prognostications, to watch for it, and anticipate its cruel blows in incipient madness.—‘Our Bibles say we know not the day nor the hour,’ said Grand’mère; ‘but He knows—that is enough.’” One of La Bruyère’s pensées sur la mort is, that “ce qu’il y a de certain dans la mort, est un peu adouci par ce qui est incertain: c’est un indéfini dans le tems, qui tient quelque chose de l’infini, et de ce qu’on appelle éternité.” Byron indeed utters the remonstrant query,

But his sigh was little in the spirit of the Psalmist’s prayer to be made to know his end, and the measure of his days, what it was.