Serious historical inquiry is inevitably at odds with the idea of providence in history. To such inquiry providence is an unnecessary and frustrating hypothesis. For somewhat different reasons, including embarrassment about triumphalism and presumption in the past, modem theologians rarely speak of providence. Nevertheless, what men have made of providence has had a considerable role in making and viewing history. Here then my concern is with the ways of men to God.

Historians are fond of looking back over the panorama of the past and writing about periods of cultural change that altered the continuity of history. The age of discovery and the rise of the city are phrases that describe such pivotal epochs. These are not Madison Avenue-inspired book titles, but legitimate interpretative descriptions of past ages that provide a key to understanding the development of American civilization. Although the history of American Catholicism does not lend itself to such epochal descriptions, interpretative concepts are applicable in this area of study as well and they can provide useful keys to the analysis of the past.

King Hsuan of Ch'u said to his ministers: “I have heard that the people in the north fear Chao Hsi-hsu. Why is this?” None of his ministers could answer. Then Chiang I said: “The tiger feeds on the hundred beasts. One day the tiger caught a fox. The fox said: ‘Your honor dare not eat me. God has made me the strongest of the animals, and were you to eat me, you would violate the law of God. If you don't believe me, let me walk before you. Follow along, and you will see that none of the animals dare do anything but run away when they see me coming.’ The tiger agreed, and walked behind the fox; and, indeed, the other beasts all fled. The tiger did not realize that it was he the hundred beasts feared, but thought it was the fox. Now the king controls 5,000 square miles of territory and has a million men under arms. But all of this has been entrusted to Chao Hsi-hsu. The northerners fear Hsi-hsu, but what they really fear are the king's armed men—just as the hundred beasts feared the tiger.”

During the Commercial Revolution, as European powers became deeply involved in Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade, there developed a lively debate about whether a country could claim and exercise legal sovereignty over the sea. The great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), in his work Mare Liberum (1609), argued against such notions. An English lawyer and polymath John Selden (1584–1654), espousing British interests, took the affirmative side of the debate in Mare Clausum (1936). The issues had been discussed long before Grotius and Selden had written their works, but the debate intensified as the competition both for worldwide markets and for access to offshore fishing banks became sharper.

There exists a substantial body of revolutionary analysis focused on those elusive objective conditions that permit rebels to rise with some hope of success. There is, of course, no more a general consensus on how to begin an insurrection than on how to prevent one. At one extreme there exist the more simpleminded adherents of Règis Debray who have suggested that a small band of the brave, a foco, may alone spark an insurrection against an oppressive regime. At the other are those reluctant rebels who insist on so extensive a roster of assets that the moment to rise continues to recede into the distant future. Still within the middle ground conditions have sufficiently encouraged some so that, possessed of a just cause and hopeful of ultimate victory, the armed struggle has been launched. As a result in southern Africa and Latin America, on Mindanao and in the Basque country of Spain, there are insurrections under different banners. Some appear close to victory and others on the verge of disaster, a few are little more than the disorderly residue of past hopes and others scarcely begun. For all a crucial question remains how to escalate the initial thrust. An insurrection may begin as the act of an urban conspiracy, spring from the operations of a rural foca, evolve out of the spontaneous rising of the masses; but unless the moment is ripe any insurrection can flicker out in the recriminations of exiles or be interned with the dead. And, perhaps, no set of potential rebels have had as much experience and as little luck in identifying the moment to strike as the Irish. Yet, the news from Northern Ireland indicates that this time they must be doing something right—or the British something wrong.