The Bishop's Predictions
By Stephen Steele - Posted at Gentle Reformation : In 1876, William Alexander, the Bishop of Derry (and future Archbishop of Armagh), made two predictions in his Bampton Lectures at Oxford University (later published as The Witness of the Psalms to Christ and Christianity ). The predictions are unrelated – other than that both have proved uncannily true. The first was that progress won’t make people happy. The second was that if God’s people forgot that Christ was in the Psalter, it would become almost unheard in churches. Progress won’t make us happy According to the Bishop, modern science promised a future ‘City of God minus God; a Paradise minus the Tree of Life; a Millennium with education to perfect the intellect, and sanitary improvements to emancipate the body from a long catalogue of evils’. But what would be the result? 'Sorrow, no doubt, will not be abolished; immortality will not be bestowed. But we shall have comfortable and perfectly drained houses to be wretched in’
