Hugo Grotius · 22 of 132

SECT. XVII. The same proved also from predictions.

THERE is another argument to prove the providence of God, very like to this of miracles, and no less powerful, drawn from the foretelling of future events, and was very often and very expressly done amongst the Hebrews; such as the man’s being childless who should rebuild Jericho; the destroying the altar of Bethel, by king Josiah by name, above three hundred years before it came to pass: so also Isaiah foretold the very name and principal acts of Cyrus; and Jeremiah the event of the siege of Jerusalem, after it was surrounded by the Chaldeans; and Daniel the translation of the empire from the Assyrians to the Medes and Persians, and from them to Alexander of Macedon, whose successors to part of his kingdom were to be the posterity of Lagus and Seleucus: and what evils the Hebrews should undergo from all these, particularly the famous Antiochus; so very plainly, that Porphyry, who compared the Grecian histories, extant in his time, with the prophecies, could not make it out any other way, but by saying, that the things ascribed to Daniel were wrote after they came to pass; which is the same as if any one should deny, that what is now extant under the name of Virgil, and was always thought to be his, was writ by him in Augustus’s time. For there was never any more doubt amongst the Hebrews concerning the one, than there was amongst the Romans concerning the other. To all which may be added, the many and express oracles amongst those of Mexico and Peru, which foretold the coming of the Spaniards into those parts, and the calamities that would follow.

And by other arguments..

To this may be referred very many dreams, exactly agreeing with the events; which, both as to themselves and their causes, were so utterly unknown to those that dreamed them, that they cannot without great shamelessness be attributed to natural causes: of which kind the best writers afford us eminent examples. Tertullian has made a collection of them in his book of the soul; and ghosts have not only been seen, but also heard to speak, as we are told by those historians who have been far from superstitious credulity; and by witnesses in our own age, who lived in Sina, Mexico, and other parts of America; neither ought we to pass by that common method of examining persons’ innocence, by walking over red-hot ploughshares, viz. fire ordeal, mentioned in so many histories of the German nation, and in their very laws.