Miscellanies Author:Charles Kingsley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE POETEY OF SACEED AND LEandENDAEY AET. MUCH attention has been excited this year by the alleged fulfilment of a prophecy that the Papal power was to receiv... more »e its death-blow—in temporal matters, at least—during the past year 1848. For ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming, the obsolete author, who has so suddenly revived in the public esteem, than we have in other interpreters of prophecy. Their shallow and bigoted views of past history are enough to damp our faith in their discernment of the future. It does seem that people ought to understand what has been, before they predict what will be. History is ' the track of God's footsteps through time;' it is in His dealings with our forefathers that we may expect to find the laws by which He will deal with us. Not that Mr. Fleming's conjecture must be false : among a thousand guesses there ought surely to be one right one. And it is almost impossible for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at some truth or other. The interpreters of prophecy therefore, like all other interpreters, have our best wishes, though not our sanguine hopes. But, in the meantime, there are surely signs of the approaching ruin of Popery, more certain than any speculations onthe mystic numbers of the Revelation. We should point to recent books,—not to books which merely expose Rome—that has been done long ago, usque ad nauseam,—but to books which do her justice,—to Mr. Maitland's ' Dark Ages;' Lord Lindsay's ' Christian Art;' and last, but not least, to the very charming book of Mrs. Jameson, whose title heads this review. In them, and in a host of similar works in Germany, which Dr. Wiseman's party hail as signs of coming triumph, we fancy we see the death-warrant of Romanism ; because t...« less