of other series of events that could have intersected at many points the hypothetical history.
If there had been no Reformation, we could safely predict that there would have been no Counter-reformation, that is, that many of the events which occurred in the seventeenth century would not have taken place. True enough. But if there had been no Reformation, would we now be enjoying tolerance under a universal religion of free-thinking Popes who interpreted sacred Biblical history as morally edifying fairy tales—as Santayana apparently believes? Many other things would have had not to happen before this kind of civilized culture could have developed. So many, indeed, that we can dismiss the suggestion as fanciful.
It is safe to predict, that is, offer valid grounds for asserting, that if at Versailles in 1919 either the policy of Clemenceau or that of Wilson had been followed to the bitter end, instead of compounding the weaknesses of both, the rest of the world world have had less to fear from Hitler. But if Saul had remained Saul, or if, reborn as Paul, he had decided to bring the gospel of the Messiah, crucified and risen, to the Gentiles, what would have been the fate of the Roman Empire, of Europe under Alaric and other barbarian chiefs, of France in the eighteenth century, assuming that there were a France? Would modern science and democracy have developed earlier or not at all? Here only the sketchiest answers can be made with good sense.[1]
When we draw the line of possible eventuality too far out of the immediate period, the mind staggers under the cumulative weight of the unforeseen. That is why prophecy is such a hazardous vocation. We are more alive to the chances of the future because they are still before us, but the past, too, even though it is over, is an exciting story of chances missed. The past closes silently behind us with the awful finality of a divine judgment. But the finality means that historical events are irreversible, not that they are all necessary, and certainly not that they are all good. A deceptive backward glance mistakes the unforeseen for the predetermined. The hypnotic influence of the long-established, of what cannot be changed, often misleads
- ↑ This is the drawback of all reconstructions of prolonged historical periods, such as Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie—L’Utopie dans l’Histoire, in which he gives us an account of European civilization from the second century to the seventeenth “not as it was, but as it might have been.” Such reconstructions, although of dubious scientific value, may have great moral and pedagogical significance.
