All historians worth the name
have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can
foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is
to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this
mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could
have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been
foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an
outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.
The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass
of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among
its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising
up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.
Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory
VII, could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the
Caesars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated
sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment
of a national expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in
operation round him.
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