^^\^ 
 
 :^g^- 
 
 
 on 
 
 
 
 ^., > 
 
 /,'#'#^ 
 
 '/.I/'./;
 
 4-r-

 
 THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 
 
 ^wo .^tcture.') 
 
 DELIVERED BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH, M.A., 
 
 EKGITTS PBOPESSOE OF MODEEN HISTOBY IN THE TTNITEESITT OF OXFOED. 
 
 J. IT. AND Jas. PAKKEE. 
 1861.
 
 |nnt«b b|> ^tms. $uxhx, €otnmnthi, ®«for&.
 
 PKEFACE. 
 
 npHE theory of History adopted in these lectures 
 is in accordance with the doctrine of Progress; 
 a doctrine which is so far from being new that it 
 must have been acted on by all who took thought 
 for posterity. 
 
 Christianity cannot be said to be opposed to Pro- 
 gress, unless it can be shewn that Christianity forbids 
 or discourages virtue, science, or industry, these being 
 the three elements of which human progress consists. 
 
 The great source of Progress is love of our kind ; 
 as the great obstacle to Progress is self-love, which 
 perverts our moral activity, turns our intellect to the 
 indulgence of ambition and vanity instead of the 
 pursuit of truth, and destroys, through indolence and 
 vice, the industry which adds to the common store. 
 Love of our kind as opposed to self-love is the cardinal 
 and distinguishing doctrine of Christianity. On this 
 vital point the newest and most daring philosophy 
 has only been able to repeat the Christian precept 
 with a verbal change, or a change which, if more than 
 verbal, is wrong. If "live for others" means more 
 than " love one another," it means total annihilation 
 of self, which is an impracticable di'cam. 
 
 It might have been imagined that the unworldliness 
 which Christianity imposes would prevent men from 
 
 b2
 
 making themselves useful to the world. But such is 
 in fact not the case. The greatest statesmen and 
 soldiers have been most fervent Christians. Even 
 enthusiasts, who imagined the world was coming to 
 an end, have displayed great practical energy and 
 wisdom, as well as entire devotion to their cause. 
 This is a paradox which it would be a platitude to 
 explain. 
 
 The corporate interests of certain State Churches 
 have indeed been fearfully opposed to the progress 
 of mankind ; but they have been equally opposed to 
 the progress of Christianity. State Churches, what- 
 ever relation they may bear to Christianity, are not of 
 its essence, any more than sacerdotalism, sacramental- 
 ism, dogmatism, or other additions which were un- 
 known to the first disciples of Christ. If Christianity 
 is to be arraigned as an enemy to reason and im- 
 provement, we must put ourselves in the position 
 of listeners to the Sermon on the Mount, and regard 
 the religion in its original essence as a new principle 
 of action and a new source of spiritual life. 
 
 It has been said that Chiistianity must be retrograde, 
 because instead of looking forward it looks back to 
 Christ. It is not easy to see why it is more retro- 
 grade to look back to the source of a higher spiritual 
 life in Christ than it is to look back to the source of 
 all life in Mr. Darwin's monad. 
 
 If indeed there is any passage in the Gospels put- 
 ting an artificial limit to the improvement of human 
 character, or enumerating certain observances as the 
 
 \ <^
 
 sum of attainable perfection, the case is altered ; but 
 the passage must be produced. If it is said that the 
 special type of character exhibited by the Founder of 
 Christianity is the artificial limit, I answer that I see 
 nothing in that type which is special, or which is not 
 of the essence of all goodness and beauty of character ; 
 that the imitation of it has, as a matter of fact, issued 
 in endless improvement and boundless variety; and 
 that it is connected with no special observances what- 
 ever. But the character of the Founder of Chris- 
 tianity, as well as His doctrine, must be viewed as it 
 is, and not as Eastern Asceticism, Eomanism, or any 
 other perversion of Christianity represents it. 
 
 Again, Christianity is not opposed to a philosophic 
 view of history, unless it denies the unity of the 
 human race, or teaches that any nation was dis- 
 regarded by God, and left out of the scheme of Pro- 
 vidence. Chi'istianity teaches the reverse of this, 
 whatever may be taught, directly or indirectly, by any 
 Christian sect. " God . . . hath made of one blood all 
 nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the 
 earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, 
 and the bounds of theii- habitation ; that they should 
 seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and 
 find Him, though He be not far from every one of us." 
 Could the unity of the human race, the providential 
 character of all history, or the progress of men towards 
 the knowledge of all that is divine, be enunciated in 
 clearer language than this ? 
 
 Coleridge, the greatest of English divines, as well
 
 6 
 
 as one of the greatest of English philosophers, pro- 
 pounded most distinctly, and in the same pages with 
 the most fervent Christianity, views of history which 
 are now imagined to be new and startling discoveries, 
 the exclusive property of an antichristian school. In his 
 Friend (vol. iii. Essay 10,) he treats all history as an, 
 education of the mind of the race, and shews the part 
 which the great nations of antiquity played in the 
 process. " In the education of the mind of the race," 
 he says, "as in that of the individual, each different 
 age and purpose requires different objects and dif- 
 ferent means ; though all dictated by the same prin- 
 ciple, tending towards the same end, and forming 
 consecutive parts of the same method." After speak- 
 ing of the Greeks, he adds, " That I include them as 
 educated under a distinct providential, though not 
 miraculous, dispensation, will surprise no one who 
 reflects that in whatever has a permanent operation 
 on all the destinies and intellectual condition of man- 
 kind at large — that in all which has been manifestly 
 employed as a co-agent in the mightiest revolution of 
 the moral world, the propagation of the Gospel ; and 
 in the intellectual progress of mankind, in the re- 
 storation of philosophy, science, and the ingenuous 
 arts — it were irreligious not to acknowledge the hand 
 of Divine Providence *." 
 
 * This Essay in "The Priend" may possibly have suggested the 
 idea which has been worked out by Dr. Temple in " Essays and 
 Reviews." He has been confidently charged by antichristian writers 
 with borrowing it from the teachers of their school ; and the charge, 
 ignorantly made, has been ignorantly believed.
 
 These few remarks seemed necessary to guard 
 against unfoir inferences and deductions. 
 
 The first of these two lectures was delivered some 
 time ago — in June 1859, and was then printed for 
 private circulation; but it has been revised for pub- 
 lication.
 
 LECTUEE I. 
 
 The first question which the student of history has 
 now to ask himself is, Whether history is governed 
 by necessary laws? If it is, it ought to be written 
 and read as a science. It may be an imperfect science 
 as yet, owing to the complexity of the phenomena, 
 the incompleteness of the observations, the want of 
 a rational method ; but, in its nature, it is a science, 
 and is capable of being brought to perfection. 
 
 History could not be studied as a whole, — there 
 could be no philosophy of history, — till we thoroughly 
 felt the unity of the human race. That great dis- 
 covery is one which rebukes the pretensions of indi- 
 vidual genius to be the sole source of progress, for it 
 was made not by one man, but by mankind. Kindled 
 by no single mind, it spread over the world like the 
 light of morning ; and the prism must be the work 
 of a cimning hand which could discriminate in it the 
 blended rays of duty, interest, and affection. First, 
 perhaps, the greatness of the Eoman character broke 
 through the narrow exclusivencss of savage nation- 
 ality, by bending in its hour of conquest to the intel- 
 lect of conquered Greece ; nobler in this than Greece 
 herself, who, with all her philosophy, talked to the last 
 of Greek and barbarian, and could never see the man 
 beneath the slave. First, perhaps, on the mind of the 
 Roman Stoic the great idea of the community of man, 
 with its universal rights and duties, distinctly though
 
 10 
 
 faintly dawned. And therefore to the Eoman Stoic it 
 was given to be the real author of Home's greatest gift, 
 the science of universal law. Christianity broke down 
 far more thoroughly the barriers between nation and 
 nation, between freeman and slave, for those who 
 were within her pale. Between those within and 
 those without the pale she put perhaps a deeper and 
 wider gulf; not in the times of the apostles, but in 
 the succeeding times of fierce conflict with heathen 
 vice and persecution, and still more in the fanatical 
 and crusading middle ages. The resurrection of Greece 
 and Eome in the revival of their literature made the 
 world one again, and united at once the Christian to 
 the heathen, and the present to the remotest past. 
 The heathen moralist, teaching no longer in the dis- 
 guise of a school divine, but in his own person, the 
 heathen historian awakening Christian sympathies, the 
 heathen poet touching Christian hearts, shewed that 
 in morality, in sympathy, in heart, though not in 
 faith, the Christian and the heathen were one. That 
 sense of unity, traversing all distinctions between 
 Christian and pagan, and between the Churches of 
 divided Christendom, has grown with the growth of 
 philosophy, science, jurisprudence, literature, art, the 
 common and indivisible heritage of man. A more 
 enlightened and humane diplomacy and the gradual 
 ascendency of international law have strengthened 
 the sense of common interests and universal jus- 
 tice from which they sprang; and France, the eldest 
 daughter of the Church, has crusaded to save the 
 Crescent from the aggression of the Cross. Com- 
 merce, too, breaking link by link its mediaeval fetters, 
 has helped to knit nations together in sympathy as 
 well as by interest, and to remove the barriers of the
 
 11 
 
 dividing mountains and the estranging sea. There 
 was needed, besides, a great and varied range of re- 
 corded history to awaken thoroughly the historic 
 sense, to furnish abundant matter for historical reflec- 
 tion, and to arouse a lively curiosity as to the relation 
 between the present and the past. There was needed 
 a habit of methodical investigation, with a view to 
 real results, of which physical science is the great 
 school. There was needed a knowledge, which could 
 only come from the same source, of the physical con- 
 ditions and accessories of man's estate. These condi- 
 tions fulfilled, the philosophy of history was born ; and 
 its birth opens a new realm of thought, full, we can 
 scarcely doubt, of great results for man. Vice indeed 
 was the precursor of this philosophy. In his mind first 
 arose the thought, awakened by the study of Greek 
 and Eoman antiquity, that history should be read as 
 a whole, and that this whole might have a law. But 
 the law he imagined, that of revolving cycles of men 
 and events, was wild and fruitless as a dream. 
 
 It was natural that physical science should claim the 
 philosophy of history as a part of her own domain, that 
 she should hasten to plant her flag upon this newly- 
 discovered land of thought. Flushed with unhoped- 
 for triumphs, why should she not here also triumph 
 beyond hope ? She scorns to see her advance arrested 
 by the imagined barrier between the physical and 
 moral world. The phenomena of man's life and his- 
 tory are complicated, indeed, more complicated even 
 than those of the tides or of the weather ; but the 
 phenomena of the tides and of the weather have 
 yielded or are yielding to close observation, well re- 
 corded statistics, and patient reasoning ; why shouM 
 not the phenomena of man's actions yield too, and life
 
 12 
 
 and history be filled, like all the world besides, with 
 the calm majesty of natural law? It is a grand 
 thought ; and at this time it finds not only minds 
 open to its grandeur, but hearts ready to welcome 
 it. "Western Christendom has long been heaving with 
 a mighty earthquake of opinion, only less tremendous 
 than that of the Eeformation because there was no 
 edifice so vast and solid as mediaeval Catholicism to 
 be laid low by the shock. Some their fear of this 
 earthquake has driven to take refuge in ancient fanes, 
 and by altars whose fires are cold. Others are filled 
 with a Lucretian longing to repose under the tranquil 
 reign of physical necessity, to become a part of the 
 material world, and to cast their perplexities on the 
 popes and hierarchs of science and her laws. Only let 
 them be sure that what is august and tranquillizing 
 in law really belongs to science, and that it is not bor- 
 rowed by her from another source. Let them be sure 
 that in putting off the dignity, they also put off the 
 burden of humanity. If man is no higher in his des- 
 tinies than the beast or the blade of grass, it may be 
 better to be a beast or a blade of grass than a man. 
 
 History is made up of human actions, whether those 
 actions are political, social, religious, military, or of 
 any other kind. The founding and maintaining of 
 institutions, the passing and keeping of laws, the 
 erecting and preserving of churches and forms of wor- 
 ship, the instituting and observing of social customs, 
 may be all resolved into the element of action. So 
 may all intellectual history, whether of speculation, 
 observation, or composition, with their products and 
 effects ; the bending of the mind to thought being 
 in every respect as much an action as the moving of 
 the hand. What we call national actions, are the
 
 13 
 
 actions of a multitude of men acting severally though 
 concurrently, and with all the incidents of several 
 action ; or they are the actions of those men who are 
 in power. Whatever there is in action, therefore, will 
 be everywhere present in history ; and the founders 
 of the new physical science of history have to lay the 
 foundations of their science in what seems the quick- 
 sand of free-will. 
 
 This difficulty they have to meet either by shewing 
 that free-will is an illusion, or by shewing that its 
 presence throughout history is compatible, in spite 
 of all appearances, with the existence of an exact 
 historical science. 
 
 They take both lines. Some say ' Free-will is an 
 illusion, or, at least, we cannot be sure that it is real. 
 Our only knowledge of it is derived from conscious- 
 ness, and it is by no means certain that consciousness 
 is a faculty. It is very likely only a state or con- 
 dition of the mind. Besides, the mind cannot observe 
 itself : it is not in nature that the same thing should 
 be at once observer and observed.' 
 
 It signifies little under what technical head we class 
 consciousness. The question is, from what source do 
 those who repudiate its indications derive the know- 
 ledge of their own existence ? From what other source 
 do they derive the knowledge that their words, the 
 very words they use in this denial, correspond to their 
 thoughts, and will convey their thoughts to others? 
 The mind may not be able to place itself on the table 
 before it, or look at itself through a microscope, and 
 there may be nothing else in nature like its power of 
 self-observation; possibly the term self-observation, 
 being figurative, may not adequately represent the 
 fact, and may even, if pressed, involve some confusion
 
 14 
 
 of ideas. But he is scarcely a philosopher who fancies 
 that the peculiarity of a mental fact, or our want of 
 an adequate name for it, is a good reason for setting 
 the fact aside. The same writers constantly speak of 
 the phenomena of mind ; so that it appears there must 
 be some phenomena of mind which they have been 
 able to observe. In whose mind did they see these 
 phenomena? Did they see them in the minds of 
 others, or, by self- observation, in their own ? 
 
 But others say, ' We admit the reality of free-will ; 
 but the opposite to free-will is necessity, and to form 
 the foundation of our science, we do not want neces- 
 sity, but only causation and the certainty which cau- 
 sation carries with it : necessity is a mysterious and 
 embarrassing word, let us put it out of the question.' 
 But then, if necessity does not mean the certain con- 
 nexion between cause and effect, what is it to mean ? 
 Is the word to be sent adrift on the dictionary without 
 a meaning ? The rooted contradiction in our minds 
 between the notion of freedom of action, and that of 
 being bound by the chain of certain causation, is not 
 to be removed merely by denying us the use of the 
 term by which the contradiction is expressed. 
 
 But, again, they say ' You may as well get over this 
 apparent contradiction in life and history between 
 free-will and certain science, for you must get over 
 the apparent contradiction in life and history between 
 free-will and the certain omniscience of the Creator, 
 which comprehends human actions, and which you 
 acknowledge as part of your religious faith.' "No 
 doubt this, though an argumentiim ad hominem^ is 
 perfectly relevant, because the objection it meets is 
 one in the minds of those to whom it is addressed ; 
 and I think it has been justly observed, that it can-
 
 15 
 
 not be answered by distinguishing between foreknow- 
 ledge and afterknowledge, because its force lies in the 
 certainty which is common to all knowledge, not in 
 the relation of time between the knowledge and the 
 thing known. The real answer seems to be this, 
 that the words omniscience, omnipotence, omnipre- 
 sence, though positive in form, are negative in mean- 
 ing. They mean only that we know not the bounds 
 of the knowledge, power, or presence of God. What 
 we do know, if we know anything, is that His pre- 
 sence is not such as to annihilate or absorb our sepa- 
 rate being, nor His knowledge and power such as to 
 overrule or render nugatory our free-will. 
 
 Nor will it avail the constructors of a science of 
 Man to cite the moral certainty with which we pre- 
 dict the conduct of men or nations whose characters 
 are settled. This settled character was formed by 
 action, and the action by which it was formed was 
 free ; so that the uncertain element which baffles 
 science is not got rid of, but only thrown back over 
 a history or a life. 
 
 Then they analyse action, and say it follows its 
 motive, and may be predicted from the motive, just 
 as any other consequent in nature follows and may 
 be predicted from its antecedent. It follows a motive, 
 but how are we to tell ivliicli motive it will follow. 
 Action is a choice between motives ; even in our most 
 habitual acts it is a choice between acting and rest. 
 The only ground we have for calling one motive the 
 strongest is that it has prevailed before ; but the 
 motive which has prevailed before, and prevailed 
 often and long, is set aside in every great change 
 of conduct, individual or national, by an effort of the 
 will, for which, to preserve the chain of causation and
 
 16 
 
 the science founded on that chain, some other ante- 
 cedent must be found. 
 
 Action, we said, was a choice between motives. 
 It is important in this inquiry to observe that it is 
 a choice between them, not a compound or a resultant 
 of them all; so that a knowledge of all the motives 
 present at any time to the mind of a man or nation 
 would not enable us to predict the action as we pre- 
 dict the result of a combination of chemical elements 
 or mechanical forces. The motive which is not acted 
 on goes for nothing ; and as that motive may be and 
 often is the one which — according to the only test we 
 have, that of the man's previous actions — is the strong- 
 est, we see on what sort of foundation a science of 
 action and history must build. 
 
 When the action is done, indeed, the connexion 
 between it and its motive becomes necessary and 
 certain ; and we may argue backwards from action 
 to motive with all the accuracy of science. Finding 
 at Eome a law to encourage tyrannicide, we are 
 certain that there had been tyrants at Eome, though 
 there is nothing approaching to historical evidence 
 of the tyranny of Tarquin. 
 
 Those who would found history or ethics on a ne- 
 cessarian, or, if they will, a causal theory of action, 
 have three things to account for, — our feeling at the 
 moment of action that we are free to do or not to 
 do, — our approving or blaming ourselves afterwards 
 for having done the act or left it undone, which 
 implies that we were free, — and the approbation or 
 blame of each other, which implies the same thing. 
 I do not see that they even touch any of these pro- 
 blems but the first. They do not tell us whether 
 conscience is an illusion or not; nor, if it is not an
 
 17 
 
 illusion, do they attempt to resolve for us the curious 
 question, what this strange pricking in the heart of 
 a mere necessifry agent means. They do not explain 
 to us why we should praise or blame, reward or punish 
 each other's good or bad actions, any more than the 
 good or bad effects of anything in the material world ; 
 why the virtues and vices of man are to be treated on 
 a totally different footing from the virtues of food or 
 the vices of poison. Praise and blame they do, — praise 
 as heartily and blame at least as sharply as the rest of 
 the world ; but they do not tell us why. We must 
 not be deceived by the forms of scientific reasoning, 
 when those who use them do not face the facts. 
 
 Great stress is laid by the Necessarians on what are 
 called moral statistics. It seems that, feel as free as 
 we may, our will is bound by a law compelling the 
 same number of men to commit the same number of 
 crimes within a certain cycle. The cycle, curiously 
 enough, coincides ^dth the period of a year which is 
 natui'ally selected by the Eegistrar- General for his 
 reports. But, first, the statistics tendered are not 
 moral, but legal. They tell us only the outward act, 
 not its inward moral character. They set down alike 
 under Murder the act of a Eush or a Palmer, and the 
 act of an Othello. Secondly, we are to cbaw some 
 momentous inference from the uniformity of the re- 
 turns. How far are they uniform ? M. Quetelet gives 
 the number of convictions in France for the years 
 1826, '7, '8, '9, severally as 4348, 4236, 4551, 4475. 
 The similarity is easily accounted for by that general 
 uniformity of human nature which we all admit. How 
 is the difference, amounting to more than 300 between 
 one year and the next, to be accounted for except by 
 free-will? But, thirdly, it will be found that these 
 
 c
 
 18 
 
 statistics are unconsciously, but effectually, garbled. 
 To prove the law of the uniformity of crime, periods 
 are selected when crime was uniform. Instead of 
 four years of the Eestoration, in which we know very 
 well there was no great outburst of wickedness, give 
 us a table including the civil war between the Bur- 
 gundians and the Armagnacs, the St. Bartholomew, 
 the Eeign of Terror, or the days of June 1848. It 
 will be said, perhaps, that this was under different 
 circumstances ; but it is a very free use of the term 
 ' circumstance' to include in it all the evil and foolish 
 actions of men which lead to, or are committed in, 
 a sanguinary revolution. Social and criminal statistics 
 are most valuable; the commencement of their ac- 
 curate registration will probably be a great epoch in 
 the history of legislation and government; but the 
 reason why they are so valuable is that they are not 
 fixed by necessity, as the Necessarians allege or in- 
 sinuate, but variable, and may be varied for the better 
 by the wisdom of governments, — governments which 
 Necessarians ^are always exhorting to reform them- 
 selves, instead of shewing how their goodness or bad- 
 ness necessarily arises from the climate or the food. 
 If the statistics were fixed by necessity, to collect 
 them would be a mere indulgence of curiosity, like 
 measuring all the human race when we could not add 
 a cubit to their stature. 
 
 It is important when people talk of calculating the 
 probabilities and chances of human action on these 
 statistics, to guard against a loose use (which I think 
 I have seen somewhere noted) of the words probability 
 and chance. Probability relates to human actions, 
 which cannot be calculated unless you can find a 
 certain antecedent for the will. Chance is mere igno-
 
 19 
 
 ranee of physical eauses ; ignorance in what order the 
 cards will turn up, because we are ignorant in what 
 order they are turned down : and it is difficult to see 
 by what manipulation, out of mere ignorance, know- 
 ledge can be educed. It is worth remarking also that 
 an average is not a law : not only so, but the taking 
 an average rather implies that no law is known. 
 
 But, it may be said, all must give way to a law 
 gathered by fair and complete induction fi'om the 
 facts of history. It is perhaps not so clear why know- 
 ledge drawn from within ourselves should give way 
 to knowledge drawn from without. But be that as it 
 may, we may pronounce at once that a complete in- 
 duction fi'om the facts of history is impossible. History 
 cannot furnish its own inductive law. An induction, 
 to be sound, must take in, actually or virtually, all 
 the facts. But history is unlike all other studies in 
 this, that she never can have, actually or lirtually, 
 all the facts before her. What is past she knows in 
 part ; what is to come she knows not, and can never 
 know. The scroll from which she reads is but half 
 unrolled : and what the other half contains, what 
 even the next line contains, no one has yet been able 
 to foretell. Prediction, the crown of all science, the 
 new science of Man and History has not ventui'ed to 
 put on. That prerogative, which is the test of her 
 legitimacy, she has not yet ventured to exert. 
 
 Science indeed, far from indicating that the materials 
 for the great induction are complete, would, if any- 
 thing, rather lead us to believe that the human race 
 and its history are young. The vast length of geologic 
 compared with the shortness of historic time, whispers 
 that the drama for which the stage was so long pre- 
 paring must have many acts still to come. 
 
 c2
 
 20 
 
 This ignorance of what is to come destroys, it would 
 seem, among other inductive theories of history, the 
 famous one of Comte, who makes the course of history 
 to be determined by the progress of science through 
 its three stages, "Theological," "Metaphysical," and 
 " Positive ;" — " Positive " having, let us observe, a 
 double meaning, atheistical and sound^ so that the use 
 of it, in effect, involves a continual begging of the 
 question. How can M. Comte tell that the " Positive" 
 era is the end of all ? How can he tell that the three 
 stages he has before him are anything but a mere 
 segment of a more extensive law ? But besides this, 
 before we proceed to compare a colossal hypothesis 
 with the facts, we must see whether it is rational 
 in itself, and consistent with our previous knowledge. 
 An hypothesis accounting for certain facts by reference 
 to the sun's motion round the earth, or anything else 
 obviously false or absurd, may be dismissed at once, 
 without the form of a verification. The three terms 
 of the supposed series, the Theological, Metaphysical, 
 and Positive states, must be distinct and successive, 
 or it will be no series at all. iNow taking " Positive" 
 in the fair sense, the sense of sound^ Theology and 
 Positive Science, the theological and the scientific 
 view of the world, are neither distinct nor successive, 
 but may very well go, and do often go, together. A 
 man may be, and Newton was, a sound astronomer 
 and a great discoverer of astronomical laws, and yet 
 believe that the stars were made and are held in their 
 courses by the hand of God. A man may be, and 
 Butler was, a sound moral philosoj)her, and a great 
 discoverer of the laws of human nature, and yet 
 believe human nature to be in its origin and end 
 divine. Positivists cite for our admiration a say-
 
 21 
 
 ing of Lamcnnais, contrasting, as they suppose, the 
 religious with the scientific view of things. ""Why- 
 do bodies gravitate towards each other? Because God 
 willed it, said the ancients. Because they attract each 
 other, says Science." As though God could not Avill 
 that bodies should attract each other. Polytheism, 
 putting the different parts of nature under the arbi- 
 trary dominion of separate gods, conflicts with, and 
 has been overthrown by. Science, which pi-oves that one 
 set of laws, the work of one God, traverses the whole. 
 And this I venture to think is the mustard-seed of 
 truth out of which the vast tree of M. Comte's his- 
 torical theory has grown. So far from there being 
 any conflict between Monotheism and Science, all the 
 discoveries of science confirm the hypothesis that the 
 world was made by one God; an hypothesis which, 
 it should be observed, was quite independent of the 
 progress of science, since it had been promulgated in 
 the first chapter of Genesis before science came into 
 existence. As to the Metaphysical era, which is the 
 intervening term of the series between the Theological 
 and the Positive, nothing in history corresponding to 
 this era has been or can be produced. ISTo age is or 
 can be pointed out in which a nation or mankind be- 
 lieved the phenomena of the world or of human nature 
 to be produced by metaphysical entities. A few phi- 
 losophers indeed have talked of nature as the mother 
 of all things ; but by nature they meant not a meta- 
 physical entity, but either the laws of matter per- 
 sonified, in which case they were Positivists, or the 
 God of natural religion as opposed to the God of 
 revelation, in which case they were Theists. So that 
 of the three terms of the supposed series, the first 
 runs into the thii'd and the second vanishes altogether.
 
 22 
 
 The theory is open to another objection, which is also 
 fatal. Against all the facts, though in accordance 
 with the bias naturally given to M. Comte's mind by 
 his scientific pursuits, it makes the scientific faculties 
 and tendencies predominant in man. Which view of 
 science was it that predominated in Attila and Timour, 
 who, after all, played a considerable part in determin- 
 ing the course of history ? 
 
 What has been said as to the incompleteness of the 
 phenomena of history, and the consequent impossibility 
 of a final induction as to its law, leads to a remark on 
 the theory that "Man is to be studied historically," 
 and its necessary corollary that morality is not ab- 
 solute but historical. If there can be no complete 
 historical induction, and if, at the same time, Man is 
 to be studied historically, not morally, and the rule 
 of right action is to be taken, not from our moral 
 instincts, but from the observation of historical facts, 
 it is difficult to see how there can be any rule of right 
 action at all. Morality and our moral judgment of 
 characters and actions must, it would seem, always 
 remain in suspense, till the world ends, and history is 
 complete. History of itself, if observed as science 
 observes the facts of the physical world, can scarcely 
 give man any principle or any object of allegiance, 
 unless it be success. Success accordingly enters very 
 largely into the morality of the thorough-going Po- 
 sitivist. He canonizes conquerors and despots, and 
 consigns to infamy the memory of men, who, though 
 they fell, fell struggling for a noble cause, and have 
 left a great and regenerating example to mankind. 
 The morality, not only absolute but mystical, which 
 Positivism in its second phase has adopted to satisfy 
 moral instincts, is a mere copy of the social aspect of
 
 23 
 
 Christianity ; as the Church, the sacraments, and the 
 priesthood, invented to satisfy our religious instincts, 
 are a mere copy of the Church of Eome. 
 
 You may say that virtue has prevailed in history 
 over vice, and that our allegiance is due to it as 
 the stronger. But granting that it has prevailed 
 hitherto, to 'say which is the stronger you must see 
 the end of the struggle. The theologian who, like 
 Hobbes, makes religion consist not in our moral sym- 
 pathy with the divine nature, but in necessary sub- 
 mission to divine power, will find himself in the same 
 dilemma. He claims our allegiance for the power of 
 good, not on the ground of our sympathy with good, 
 but because it is stronger than the power of evil, 
 lie, too, before he says which is the stronger, must 
 see the end of the struggle. If evil prevails, his 
 allegiance must be transferred. 
 
 It is true that morality in judging the past must 
 take notice of historical circumstances, as morality 
 takes notice of present circumstances in judging the 
 actions of living men. Allowance must be made for 
 the age, the country, the state of things in which 
 each character moved. In this sense (and it is a most 
 important sense), there may be said to be such a 
 thing as historical, in contradistinction to an absolute, 
 morality; though a morality which disregarded the 
 circumstances of actions in history or life would de- 
 serve to be called not absolute, but idiotic, and, in 
 fact, has never been propounded. But let the merit 
 or demerit of an historical action vary ever so much 
 with the circumstances, justice has been justice, mercy 
 has been mercy, honour has been honour, good faith 
 has been good faith, truthfulness has been truthful- 
 ness, from the beginning ; and each of these qualities
 
 24 
 
 is one and the same in the tent of the Arab and in 
 the senates of civilized nations. A sound historical 
 morality will sanction strong measures in evil times ; 
 selfish ambition, treachery, murder, perjury, it will 
 never sanction in the worst of times, for these are the 
 things that make times evil. 
 
 Again, institutions not good in themselves may be 
 good for certain times and countries; they may be 
 better than what went before, they may pave the way 
 for something better to follow. Despotism is an im- 
 provement on anarchy, and may lead to ordered free- 
 dom. But there must be limits to our catholicity in 
 the case of institutions as well as in the case of actions. 
 Our sympathy here, too, is bounded by morality. It 
 is just possible it may embrace the institution of 
 slavery, if slavery was really a middle term between 
 wars of extermination and a free industrial system ; 
 though it is almost impossible to imagine how slavery 
 could ever be otherwise than injurious to the character 
 of the slave-owner, whatever it might be to that of 
 the slave. But cannibalism, which certain theories 
 would lead us philosophically to accept as useful and 
 amiable in its place, must have been execrable every- 
 where and in all times. 
 
 So, again, it is most true that there is a general 
 connexion between the different parts of a nation's 
 civilization ; call it, if you will, a consensus^ provided 
 that the notion of a set of physical organs does not 
 slip in with that term. And it is most true that the 
 civilization of each nation must, to a certain extent, 
 run its own course. It is folly to force on the most 
 backward nations the laws and government of the 
 most forward, or to offer intellectual institutions to 
 tribes which have not attained the arts of life. But
 
 25 
 
 lliat which is good for all may bo given to all, and 
 among the things which are good for all arc pure 
 morality and true religion. We cannot at once give 
 a British constitution to the Ilindoo ; but we may at 
 once, in spite of consensus and necessary development, 
 teach him the virtue of truth and the unity of God. 
 The thing may be impossible in the eye of the positive 
 science of history; it is done with difficulty, but it 
 is done. 
 
 We have admitted that the philosophy of history 
 is indebted to physical science for habits of methodi- 
 cal reasoning with a view to practical results. From 
 physical science dealing, however wrongly, with his- 
 tory, we also gain a certain calmness and breadth of 
 view, derived from regions in which there is no par- 
 tizanship or fanaticism, because there are no interests 
 by which partizanship or fanaticism can be inflamed. 
 It is less easy to acknowledge that the student of 
 history is indebted to the physical school of historical 
 philosophy for enlarging our historical sympathies. 
 That school, on the contrary, extinguishes all sym- 
 pathy in any obvious sense of the word. We can 
 feel love and gratitude for free effort made in the 
 cause of man ; but how can we feel love or gratitude 
 towards the human organ of a necessary progress, any 
 more than towards a happy geological formation or a 
 fertilizing river? On the other hand, it would be 
 easy to give specimens of the sort of sympathy and 
 the sort of language which results fi'om taking a 
 purely scientific view of history and man. "Truth 
 does not regard consequences," was a noble saying; 
 but there are some cases in which the consequences 
 are a test of truth. As the physical view of character 
 and action, if it really took possession of the mind,
 
 26 
 
 must put an end to self-exertion, so the physical view 
 of the history of nations would dissolve the human 
 family by making each nation regard the other as in 
 a course of necessary progress, to be studied scien- 
 tifically, but not to be hastened or interfered with, 
 instead of their doing all they can to enlighten and 
 improve each other. 
 
 We must not suppose that because the order of 
 national actions is often necessary, the actions them- 
 selves are. A nation may have to go through one 
 stage of knowledge or civilization before it can reach 
 another, but its going through either is still free. 
 Nations must accumulate a certain degree of wealth 
 before they can have leisure to think or write ; but 
 the more degraded and indolent races refuse to accu- 
 mulate wealth, 
 
 "We must guard, too, against physical metaphors in 
 talking of history; they bring with them physical 
 ideas, and prejudice our view of the question. Men 
 do not act in masses ^ but in multitudes, each man of 
 which has a will of his own, and determines his action 
 by that will, though on the same motives as the rest. 
 Development is a word proper to physical organs, 
 which cannot be transferred to the course of a nation 
 without begging the whole question. The same thing 
 may be said of social statics and dynamics applied to 
 the order and progress of a nation. 
 
 Of course in hesitating to accept the physical view 
 of man, and the exact science founded on that view, 
 we do not deny or overlook the fact, that besides the 
 character and actions of particular men, there is a 
 common human nature, on the general tendencies of 
 which, considered in the abstract, the Moral and 
 Economical Sciences are founded. In themselves, and
 
 27 
 
 till they descend into the actions of particular men or 
 nations, these sciences are exact, and give full play to 
 all those methods of scientific reasoning, of which, 
 once more, physical science seems to be the great 
 school. But let them descend into the actions of 
 particular men and nations, and their exactness ceases. 
 The most exact of them, naturally, is Political Eco- 
 nomy, which deals with the more animal part of 
 human nature, where the tendencies are surer because 
 the conflict of motives is less. Yet even in Political 
 Economy no single proposition can be enunciated, 
 however true in the general, which is not constantly 
 falsified by individual actions. It seems doubtful 
 whether the tendencies are surer in the case of na- 
 tions than in the case of men. The course of a nation 
 is often as eccentric, as wayward, as full of heroic 
 and fiendish impulse, as impossible to predict from 
 year to year, from hour to hour, as that of a man. 
 The passions of men are not always countervailed and 
 nullified by those of other men in a nation, they are 
 often intensified by contagion to the highest degree, 
 and national panic or enthusiasm goes far beyond 
 that of single men. The course of nations, too, is 
 liable to the peculiar disturbing influence of great 
 men, who are partly made by, but who also partly 
 make, their age. A grain more of sand, said Pascal, 
 — say rather a grain less of resolution, — in the brain 
 of Cromwell, one more pang of doubt in the tossed 
 and wavering soul of Luther, and the current of Eng- 
 land or the world's history had been changed. The 
 Positivists themselves, though it is their aim to ex- 
 hibit all history as the result of general laws, are so 
 far from excluding personal influences, that they have 
 made a kind of hagiology and demonology of eminent
 
 28 
 
 promoters of progress and eminent reactionists, as 
 though these, rather than the laws, ruled the whole"; 
 and no higher, not to say more fabulous, estimate of 
 the personal influence of Hichelieu and Burke will be 
 found than in the work of a Positivist author who has 
 treated all personal history as unphilosophical gossip, 
 henceforth to be superseded by histories written on a 
 philosophical method. Accidents, too, mere accidents, 
 — the bullet which struck Gustavus on the field of 
 Liitzen, the chance by which the Eussian lancers 
 missed Napoleon in the churchyard of Eylau, the 
 chance which stopped Louis XYI. in his flight at 
 Yarennes and carried him back to the guillotine, — 
 turn the course of history as well as of life, and baffle, 
 to that extent, all law, all tendency, all prevision. 
 
 There are some other views, rather then theories, 
 of history, besides the strictly IN'ecessarian theory, 
 which conflict with free-will, and which may be just 
 noticed here. 
 
 One is the view, if it should not be rather called a 
 play of fancy, which treats all nations as stereotyped 
 embodiments of an idea, or the phases of an idea, 
 which is assumed to have been involved in the ori- 
 ginal scheme of things. China, which is naturally 
 first fixed on in applying this hypothesis to the facts 
 of history, may by a stretch of imagination be taken 
 to embody a stereotyped idea, though even in China 
 there has been change, and indeed progress, enough to 
 belie the notion. But as to all the more progressive 
 nations, this view is so palpably contradicted by the 
 most glaring facts, that we need hardly go further. 
 We may dispense with asking how an idea, which 
 never was present to any mind but that of a modern 
 philosopher, became embodied in the actions which
 
 20 
 
 make up the history of a nation ; how it passed in 
 its different phases from nation to nation, and how it 
 happens that its last phase exactly coincides with our 
 time. The half- poetic character of this view is appa- 
 rent, when we are told that the reason for beginning 
 with China is, that the light of civilization, as well as 
 the light of the sun, must rise in the East ; as though 
 the sun rose in China ! Here, in fact, we see Meta- 
 physical Philosophy, as well as Physical Science, at- 
 tempting to extend its empire over a domain which 
 is not its own. 
 
 Other writers erect some one physical influence, 
 the influence of race, of climate, of food, into a sort 
 of destiny of nations. The importance of these in- 
 fluences is great, and to trace them is a task full of 
 interest and instruction. But man is the same in his 
 moral and intellectual essence, that is, in his sovereign 
 part, whatever his stock, whether he live beneath 
 African suns or Arctic frosts, whether his food be 
 flesh, corn, or a mixture of the two. He is not, as 
 these theorists would make him, the most helpless, 
 but the most helpful of animals ; and by his mind 
 applied to building, warming, clothing, makes his 
 owTi climate ; by his mind applied to husbandry and 
 * commerce, modifies his own food. Eace seems, of all 
 physical influences, the strongest. Yet how small 
 and superficial is the difference, compared with the 
 agreement, between a cultivated man and a good 
 Christian from London and one from Paris, or even 
 between one from either of those places and one 
 from Benares. The prevailing passion for degrading 
 humanity to mere clay, and levelling it with the 
 other objects of physical science, is liable, like other 
 prevailing passions, to lead to exaggeration. Con-
 
 30 
 
 fident deductions, of the most sweeping and mo- 
 mentous kind, are made for a statement of physical 
 fact. The statements are overthrown^. Yet the de- 
 ductions are not withdrawn ; and the world in its 
 present mood seems not unwilling to believe that the 
 destruction of the proof leaves the theory founded on 
 it still generally true. 
 
 • There is also a floating notion that the lives of 
 nations are limited by some mysterious law, and that 
 they are born, grow to maturity, and die like men. 
 But the life of a nation is a metaphorical expression. 
 'No reason can be given why a nation should die; 
 and no nation ever has died, though some have been 
 killed by external force. 
 
 Parallels between the political courses of nations 
 are also sometimes pressed too far, and made to seem 
 like a necessary law. Some of the little states of 
 Greece ran a remarkably parallel course, but they 
 were not independent of each other ; they were all 
 members of the Greek nation, and influenced each 
 other's politics by contagion, and sometimes by direct 
 interference. A parallel, which seemed curiously 
 exact, was also drawn between the events of the 
 English and French Eevolutions : it seemed to hold 
 till the accession of Louis Philippe, but where is it 
 now ? The similarity between the two Eevolutions 
 was in truth superficial, compared with their dissimi- 
 larity. Eeligion, the main element of the English 
 movement, was wanting in the French : the flight of 
 the nobility, the confiscation of their estates, and the 
 establishment of a new peasant proprietary, which 
 decided the ultimate character and destiny of the 
 
 « See the Edinburgh Eeview, vol. cvii., pp. 468, 9. (April, 1858.)
 
 31 
 
 French movement, were wanting in the English. So 
 for as there was a similarity, it was produced partly 
 by mere general tendencies, which lead to anarchy 
 after gross misgovernment, to a dictatorship after 
 anarchy, and to the attempt to recover freedom after 
 a dictatorship ; partly by mere accidents, such as the 
 want of a son and heir in the case both of Charles II. 
 and of Louis XVIII., and. the consequent reversion 
 of the crown to a brother, who belonged by age and 
 education to the old state of things. Had Monmouth 
 been Charles's legitimate son, all probably would 
 have been changed. 
 
 Lastly, there is the habit of tracing special acts 
 of Providence in history. This sometimes goes the 
 length of making history one vast act of special Provi- 
 dence, and turning it into a puppet-play, which, our 
 hearts suggest, might have been played with other 
 jDuppets less sensible of pain and misery than Man. 
 Surely it is perilous work to be reading the most 
 secret counsels of the Creator by a light always feeble, 
 often clouded by prejudice, often by passion. The 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew seemed a special act of 
 Providence to the papal party of the day. Are Te 
 Deums for bloody victories in reality less profane ? Is 
 the scoff of Frederic true, and is Providence always 
 with the best-di'illed grenadiers ? To a believer in 
 Christianity nothing seems so like a special act of 
 Providence as the preparation made for the coming of 
 Christianity through the preceding events in the his- 
 tory of Greece and Kome, on which a preacher was 
 eloquently enlarging to us the other day. To a be- 
 liever in Christianity it seems so. But those who do 
 not believe in Christianity say, ' Yes : that is the true 
 account of the matter. Christianity arose from a happy
 
 32 
 
 confluence of the Greek and Eoman with the Hebrew 
 civilization. This is the source of that excellence 
 which you call divine.' Thus what appears to one 
 side a singular proof of the special interposition of 
 Providence, is used on the other side, and necessarily 
 with equal force, to shew that Christianity itself is 
 no special interposition of Providence at all, but the 
 natural result of the historical events by which it was 
 ushered into the world. The Duke of Weimar spoke 
 more safely when he said of the tyranny of the ^rst 
 Napoleon in Germany, "It is unjust, and therefore it 
 cannot last." He would have spoken more safely still 
 if he had said, ' Last or not last, it is unjust, and being 
 unjust, it carries its own sentence in its heart, and 
 will prove the weakest in the sum of things.' 
 
 Is history, then, a chaos because it has no neces- 
 sary law ? Is there no philosophy of history because 
 there is no science ? 
 
 There are two grand facts with which the phi- 
 losophy of history deals, — the division of nations and 
 the succession of ages. Are these without a mean- 
 ing ? If so, the two greatest facts in the world are 
 alone meaningless. 
 
 It is clear that the division of nations has entered 
 deeply into the counsels of creation. It is secured not 
 only by barriers of sea, mountains, rivers, intervening 
 deserts, — barriers which conquest, the steam-vessel, 
 and the railroad might surmount, — but also by race, 
 by language, by climate, and other physical influences, 
 so potent that each in its turn has been magnified into 
 the key of all history. The division is perhaps as 
 great and as deeply rooted as it could be without de- 
 stroying the unity of mankind. Nor is it hard to see 
 a reason for it. If all mankind were one state, with
 
 33 
 
 one set of customs, one literature, one code of laws, 
 and this state became corrupted, what remedy, what 
 redemption would there be ? N'one, but a convulsion 
 which would rend the frame of society to pieces, and 
 deeply injure the moral life which society is designed 
 to guard. Not only so, but the very idea of political 
 improvement might be lost, and all the world might 
 become more dead than China. Nations redeem each 
 other. They preserve for each other principles, truths, 
 hopes, aspirations, which, committed to the keeping of 
 one nation only, might, as frailty and error are con- 
 ditions of man's being, become extinct for ever. They 
 not only raise each other again when fallen, they save 
 each other from falling; they support each other's 
 steps by sympathy and example ; they moderate each 
 other's excesses and extravagances, and keep them 
 short of the fatal point by the mutual action of opinion, 
 when the action of opinion is not shut out by despotic 
 folly. They do for each other nationally very much 
 what men of different characters do for each other 
 morally in the intercourse of life : and that they 
 might do this it was necessary that they should be as 
 they are, and as the arrangements of the world secure 
 their being, at once like and unlike, like enough for 
 sympathy, unlike enough for mutual correction. Con- 
 quest, therefore, may learn that it has in the long run 
 to contend not only against morality but against nature. 
 Two great attempts have been made in the history of 
 the world to crush the nationality of large groups 
 of nations, forming the civilized portion of the globe. 
 The first was made by the military Eome of antiquity ; 
 the second, of a qualified kind, was made by the 
 ecclesiastical Rome of the middle ages, partly by 
 priestly weapons, partly by the sword of devout kings. 
 
 D
 
 34 
 
 The result was universal corruption, political and social 
 in the first case, ecclesiastical in the second. In both 
 cases aid was brought, and the fortunes of humanity 
 were restored by a power from without, but for which, 
 it would seem, the corruption would have been hope- 
 less. In the first case, the warlike tribes of the North 
 shivered the yoke of Eome, and after an agony of six 
 centuries, restored the nations. In the second case, 
 Greece rose from the dead with the New Testament in 
 her hand, and breathed into the kindred spirits of the 
 great Teutonic races such love of free enquiry and of 
 liberty, that they rose and rent the bonds of Rome 
 and her Celtic vassals, — rent them, but at the cost 
 of a convulsion which filled the world with blood, 
 and has made mutual hatred almost the law of Chris- 
 tendom from that hour to this. Without the help 
 of Greece it does not appear that the gate of the tomb 
 in which Europe lay would ever have been forced 
 back. She might have been pent in it for ever, like 
 the doomed spirits in Dante when the lid of their 
 sepulchres is closed at the last day. Wicklijffe and 
 John Huss spent their force against it in vain. The 
 tyranny might have been differently shared between 
 the different powers of the universal Church, between 
 Pope and Council, between Pope and King : but this 
 change would have done little for liberty and truth. 
 Nationality is not a virtue, but it is an ordinance of 
 nature and a natural bond ; it does much good ; in 
 itself it prevents none ; and the experience of history 
 condemns every attempt to crush it, when it has once 
 been really formed. 
 
 To pass to the other grand fact with which the 
 philosophy of history deals — the succession of ages. 
 It is clear that the history of the race, or at least of
 
 35 
 
 the principal portion of it, exhibits a course of moral, 
 intellectual, and material progress ; and that this pro- 
 gress is natural, being caused by the action of desires 
 and faculties implanted in the nature of man. It is 
 natural, but it is not like any progress caused by 
 a necessary law. It is a progress of effort, having all 
 the marks of effort as clearly as the life of a man 
 struggling and stumbling towards wisdom and virtue ; 
 and it is as being a progress of effort, not a necessary 
 development, that its incidents, revealed in history, 
 engage our interest and touch our hearts. 
 
 There seems to be nothing in the fact of progress 
 either degrading to human dignity or pampering to 
 human pride. The assertion, that history began in 
 fetichism and cannibalism, is made without a shadow 
 of proof. Those states are assumed at a venture to 
 have been the first, because they are seen to be the 
 lowest ; the possibility of their being not original 
 states, but diseases, being left out of sight. As to 
 fetichism, the first hunter or shepherd who swore to 
 another and disappointed him not, though it were to 
 his own hindrance, must have felt the supernatural 
 sanction of duty, and the eternity of moral as con- 
 trasted with physical evil ; and, therefore, he must 
 implicitly have believed in the two great articles of 
 natural religion, — God and the immortality of the 
 soul. It is mijthologfj^ of which fetichism is the low- 
 est form, that has its root in nature. Religion has its 
 root in man; and man can never have been without 
 religion, however perverted his idea of God, and how- 
 ever degraded his worship may have been. As to 
 cannibalism, it seems to be sometimes a frenzy of the 
 warlike passions, sometimes a morbid tendency en- 
 gendered by the want, in certain islands, of animal 
 
 d2
 
 36 
 
 food. At all events, it is most unlikely that the 
 original food of man should have been that which is 
 not only the most loathsome but the most difficult to 
 obtain, since he would have to overcome an animal 
 as strong and as cunning as himself. Besides, how 
 could the human race have multiplied if they had 
 lived upon each other ? 
 
 On the other hand, as progress does not imply a state 
 worse than the brutes at the beginning, so it does not 
 imply perfection in the end ; though it is not for us 
 to limit the degree of knowledge or excellence which 
 it may have pleased the Creator to render attainable at 
 last by man. This doctrine, in truth, checks our pride 
 by putting each generation, ours among the number, 
 in its true place. It teaches us that we are the heirs 
 of the past, and that to that heritage we shall add 
 a little, and but a little, before we bequeath it to the 
 future ; that we are not the last or the greatest birth 
 of time ; that all the ages have not wandered in search 
 of truth, that we might find it pure and whole ; that 
 we must plant in the hope that others will reap the 
 fruit ; that we must hand on the torch, — brighter, if 
 we do our part, — but that we must hand it on ; and 
 that no spasmodic effort will bring us in our span of 
 life and labour to the yet far-off goal. 
 
 But, welcome or unwelcome, the progress of hu- 
 manity down to the present time is a fact. Man has 
 advanced in the arts of life, in the wealth which 
 springs from them, in the numbers which they sup- 
 port, and with the increase of which the aggregate 
 powers and sympathies of the race increase. He has 
 advanced in knowledge, and still advances, and that 
 in the accelerating ratio of his augmented knowledge 
 added to his powers. So much is clear ; but then it is
 
 37 
 
 said, ' The progress is intellectual only, not moral ; 
 we have discoveries of the intellect increasing in 
 number and value from age to age, whose authors are 
 the proper and sole objects of the world's gratitude 
 and love. We have no moral improvement ; the moral 
 nature of man remains the same from the beginning, 
 with the same passions and affections, good and evil, 
 which it is confidently added are always in equili- 
 brium. The moral law is the same for all ages and 
 nations; nothing has been added to the Decalogue.' 
 This theory is carried as far as it well can be when it 
 is laid down, not only that the progress of humanity 
 is a progress of the intellect alone, but that the pro- 
 gressive virtue of the intellect lies in scepticism or 
 doubt, the state of mind which suspends all action ; 
 and when it is further laid down that moral virtue, so 
 fiir from causing the progress of humanity, sometimes 
 impedes it, the proof of which is the mischief done in 
 the world by good men who are bigots, — as though 
 bigots were good men. 
 
 That morality and man's moral nature remain 
 the same throughout historj^, is true ; it is true also 
 that morality and the moral nature remain the same 
 throughout man's life, from his birth to his old age. 
 But character does not remain the same ; the cha- 
 racter of the man is continually advancing through 
 life; and in like manner, the character of the race 
 advances through history. The moral and spiritual 
 experience of the man grows from age to age, as well 
 as his knowledge, and produces a deeper and maturer 
 character as it grows. Part of this experience is re- 
 corded in religious books, the writings of philosophers, 
 essays, poetry, works of sentiment, tales, — a class of 
 literature which must seem useless and unmeaning to
 
 38 
 
 those who hold that our progress is one of science 
 alone. Part of it is silently transmitted, with its in- 
 crease, through the training which each generation 
 gives to the next. "We ask why the ancients thought 
 and wrote so little about the beauties of nature ? It 
 certainly was not that they lived in a land less beauti- 
 ful, or saw its beauties with eyes less keen than ours. 
 But the love of natural beauties is not only in the 
 eye ; it requires a certain maturity of sentiment to call 
 out the mute sympathy with which nature is charged 
 for man, to lend their mystery to the forest and the 
 sea, its pensiveness to evening, its moral to the year. 
 "When a modern, instead of writing modern poetry, 
 imitates, however skilfully, the poetry of the Greeks, 
 how great is the sacrifice of all that most touches our 
 hearts ; and yet how much that is beyond the range of 
 Greek sentiment remains ! Philanthropy is a Greek 
 word, but how wide a circle of ideas, sentiments, af- 
 fections, unknown to the Greeks, does its present mean- 
 ing embrace ! In natural religion itself the progress 
 seems not less clear. Man's idea of God must rise as 
 he sees more of Him in His works, as he sees more of 
 Him by reflecting on his own nature, (in which the 
 true proof of natural religion lies,) and in those efforts 
 of human virtue in other men which would be unac- 
 countable if there were no God, and this world were 
 all. More and more, too, from age to age, the ideas of 
 the soul and of a future life rise in distinctness ; Man 
 feels more and more that he is a traveller between the 
 cradle and the grave, and that the great fact of life 
 is death; and the centre of. human interest moves 
 gradually towards the other world. Man would per- 
 haps have been paralyzed in his early struggle with 
 nature for subsistence, had these deep thoughts then
 
 39 
 
 taken too much possession of his mind. His earliest 
 and coarsest wants satisfied, he began to feel other 
 wants, to think of himself and his own destinies, and 
 to enter on a distinct spiritual life. Those at least 
 began to do so who had leisure, power of mind, and 
 cultivation enough to think, and the reach of whose 
 intellects made them feel keenly the narrow limit of 
 this life. Yet the spiritual life was confined to few, 
 and even in those few it was not of a very earnest 
 kind. The Phwdo is a graceful work of philosophic 
 art, rather than a very passionate efi'ort to overcome 
 the grave. The Greek, for the most part, rose lightly 
 from the banquet of life to pass into that unknown 
 land with whose mystery speculation had but dallied, 
 and of which comedy had made a jest. The Eoman 
 lay down almost as lightly to rest after his course 
 of public duty. But now if death could really re- 
 gain his victory in the mind of man, hunger and 
 philosophy together would hardly hold life in its 
 course. The latest and most thoroughgoing school of 
 materialism has found it necessary to provide some- 
 thing for man's spiritual nature, and has made a 
 shadowy divinity out of the abstract being of hu- 
 manity, and a shadowy immortality of the soul out 
 of a figment that the dead are greater than the living. 
 Lucretius felt no such need. 
 
 If it could be said that there was no progress in 
 human character because the moral law and the moral 
 nature of man remain the same in all ages, it might 
 equally be said that there could be no variety in 
 character because the moral law and our moral nature 
 are the same in all persons. But the variety of cha- 
 racters which our hearts, bound to no one tj^e, ac- 
 knowledge as good, noble, beautiful, is infinite, and
 
 40 
 
 grows with the growing variety of human life. It 
 ranges from the most rapt speculation to the most 
 vigorous action, from the gentlest sentiment to the 
 most iron public duty, from the lowliest flower in the 
 poetry of Wordsworth to that grand failure, Milton's 
 picture of the fallen archangel, who lacks the great 
 notes of evil, inasmuch as he is not mean or selfish, 
 but is true to those who have fallen by him, for them 
 braves a worse fate than the worst, and for them 
 amidst despair wears hope upon his brow. The ob- 
 servance of the moral law is the basis and condition, 
 as the common moral nature is the rudiment, of all 
 excellence in human character. But it is the basis 
 and condition only; it is negative, whereas character 
 is positive, and wins our reverence and aff'ection be- 
 cause it is so. The Decalogue gives us no account of 
 heroism or the emotions it excites ; still less does it 
 give us an account of that infinite variety of excel- 
 lences and graces which is the beauty of history and 
 life, and which we cannot doubt the great and ever- 
 increasing variety of situations in history and life 
 were intended by the Creator to produce. 
 
 If the end and the key of history is the formation 
 of character by effort, the end and key of history are 
 the same with the end and key of the life of man. If 
 the progress of the intellect is the essential part of 
 history, then the harmony between man and history 
 is at an end. Man does not rest in intellect as his 
 end, not even in intellect of a far less dry and more 
 comprehensive kind than that which the maintainors 
 of the intellectual theory of history have in view. 
 If all mankind were Hamlets it would scarcely be 
 a happier world. Suppose intellect to be the end of 
 Man, and all moral effort, all moral beauty, even all
 
 41 
 
 poetry, all sentiment, must go for nothing; they are 
 void, meaningless, and vain ; — an account of the matter 
 which hardly corresponds with the meaning and fit- 
 ness (not to assume design) which we see in every 
 part of the physical world. Certainly, if we believe 
 in a Creator, it is difficult to imagine Him making 
 such a world as this, with all its abysses of misery and 
 crime, merely that some of His creatures might with 
 infinite labour attain a modicum of knowledge which 
 can be of use only in this world, and must come to 
 nothing again when all is done. But if the formation 
 of character by effort is the end, everything has a 
 meaning, everything has a place. A certain degree 
 of material well-being, for which man naturally exerts 
 himself, is necessary to character, which is coarse and 
 low where the life of man is beast-like, miserable and 
 short. Intellect and the activity of intellect enter (we 
 need not here ask how) deeply into character. For 
 the beauty of intellectual excellence the world for- 
 gives great weakness, though not vice; and all at- 
 tempts to cast out intellect and reduce character to 
 emotion, even religious emotion, have produced only 
 a type which is useless to society, and which the 
 healthy moral taste has always rejected. And cer- 
 tainly, if character is the end of history, and moral 
 effort the necessary means to that end, (as no other 
 means of forming character is known to us,) opti- 
 mism may, after all, not be so stupid as some phi- 
 losophers suppose ; and this world, which is plainly 
 enough so arranged as to force man to the utmost 
 possible amount of effort, may well be the best of all 
 possible worlds. 
 
 We must pause before the question how deep the 
 unity of humanity and the unity of history goes;
 
 42 
 
 how far those who, through all the ages, have shared 
 in the long effort, with all its failures, errors, suffer- 
 ings, will share in the ultimate result ; how far those 
 who have sown will have their part in the harvest, 
 those who have planted in the fruit ; how far the 
 future of our race as well as the past is ours. That 
 is a secret that lies behind the veil.
 
 LECTUEE II. 
 
 In a former lecture I gave reasons for hesitating to 
 believe that history is governed by necessary laws. 
 I submitted that history is made up of the actions of 
 men, and that each of us is conscious in his own case 
 that the actions of men are free. I am not aware 
 that even an attempt has been made to reconcile the 
 judgments of the retrospective conscience ; the belief 
 implied in those judgments that each action might 
 have been done or left undone; and the exceptional 
 allowance which conscience makes in the case of 
 actions done wholly or partly on compulsion, with 
 the hypothesis that our actions are subject to causa- 
 tion like the events of the physical world. Wherein 
 is an Alfred more the subject of moral approbation 
 than a good harvest, or a Philip} II. more the subject 
 of moral disapprobation than the plague? This is 
 a question to which I am not aware that an answer 
 has yet been given. 
 
 Still, if it could be shewn that history does, as 
 a matter of fact, run in accordance with any invari- 
 able law, we might be obliged to admit that the 
 Necessarians (so I shall venture to call them till they 
 can find another application for the term 'necessity') 
 had gained their cause; though a strange contra- 
 diction would then be established between our out- 
 ward observation and our inward consciousness. I 
 therefore examined the hypothesis of M. Comte, that
 
 44 
 
 the development of humanity is regulated by the 
 progress of science through the successive stages of 
 Theological, Metaphysical, and Positive. I submitted 
 that, among other antecedent objections to the theory, 
 these three terms do not form a series. Positive, that 
 is, sound Science and Theology not being successive, 
 but co-existent, in the highest minds. Other writers 
 of the same school can hardly be said to have pro- 
 pounded a general hypothesis. They have rather 
 brought out, and I venture to think immensely ex- 
 aggerated, the effects produced on the comparative 
 history of nations by certain physical influences, espe- 
 cially by the influence of food. I think I perceive 
 that there is a tendency among the disciples of these 
 teachers to allow that their hypotheses are incapable 
 of verification; but at the same time to insist that 
 they are grand generalizations, and that, being so 
 grand, it is impossible they should not point to some 
 great truth. For my part, I see no more grandeur 
 in a scientific hypothesis which is incapable of veri- 
 fication than in the equally broad assertions of astro- 
 logy. I see no impossibility, but an extreme like- 
 lihood, that physical science having lately achieved 
 much, should arrogate more than she has achieved, 
 and that a mock science should thus have been set 
 up where the domain of real science ends. I think 
 this supposition is in accordance with the tendencies 
 of human nature and with the history of human 
 thought. It is all the more likely that this usurpa- 
 tion on the part of Science should have taken place, 
 since Theology has tempted Science to usurp by long 
 keeping her out of her rightful domain. We see here, 
 too, the reaction which follows on all injustice. 
 
 I submitted, moreover, that it is difficult to see how
 
 45 
 
 history can supply its own inductive law, since its 
 course is always advancing, the list of its phenomena 
 is never full, and, till the end of time, the materials 
 for the induction can never be complete. How often 
 would a partial observation lead physical science to 
 lay down false laws ! 
 
 But why argue without end about that which we 
 may bring to a practical test ? If the master-science 
 has been discovered, let it shew forth its power and 
 we will believe. Let those who have studied the 
 science of Man and History predict a single event by 
 means of their science ; let them even write a single 
 page of history on its method; let them bring up 
 one child by the rules for directing and modifying 
 moral development which it gives. There is another 
 and a higher test. Has the true key to human 
 character been found? Then let a nobler type of 
 character be produced. Apply the science of hu- 
 manity, and produce a better man. 
 
 Till the law of history is not only laid down but 
 shewn to agree with the facts, or till humanity has 
 been successfully treated by scientific methods, I con- 
 fess I shall continue to suspect that the new science 
 of Man is merely a set of terms, such as ' develop- 
 ment,' ' social statics,' ' social dynamics,' ' organiza- 
 tion,' and, above all, ' law,' scientifically applied to 
 a subject to which in truth they are only metaphori- 
 cally applicable : I shall continue to believe that hu- 
 man actions, in history as in individual life and in 
 society, may and do present moral connections of the 
 most intimate and momentous kind, but not that ne- 
 cessary sequence of causation on which alone science 
 can be based; I shall continue to believe that hu- 
 manity advances by free effort, but that it is not de-
 
 46 
 
 veloped according to invariable laws, sucli as, when 
 discovered, would give birth to a new science. 
 
 I confess that I am not wholly unbiassed in adher- 
 ing to this belief. I am ready to face the conclusions 
 of true science. Let true science make what disco- 
 veries it will, for example, as to the origin of life ; ter- 
 rible and mysterious as they may be, they will not be so 
 terrible or mysterious as death ; they can but shew us 
 that we spring from something a little higher than dust, 
 when we know already that to dust we must return. 
 But however we may dally with these things in 
 our hours of intellectual ease, there is no man who 
 would not recoil from rendering up his free personality 
 and all it enfolds, to become a mere link in a chain of 
 causation, a mere grain in a mass of being, even though 
 the chain were not more of iron than of gold, even 
 though the mass were all beautiful and good, instead 
 of being full of evil, loathsomeness, and horror. The 
 enthusiasts of science themselves shrink from stating 
 plainly what, upon their theory, Man is, and how his 
 essence differs from that of a brute or of a tree. Is 
 he responsible ? Wherein, it must once more be 
 asked, does his responsibility consist? Why praise 
 or blame him ? Why reward or punish him ? Why 
 glow with admiration at the good deeds of history or 
 burn with indignation at the evil ? Is the moral 
 world a reality, or is it a mere phantasmagoria, 
 a puppet-show of fate ? 
 
 Some of these writers cling to the ideas and love to 
 use the names of Spirit and of God. If spirit exists, 
 what is the spirit of man ? Did it spring together 
 with the other part of him by physical development 
 from a monad, or from a lower animal type ? We have 
 deeply rooted in our nature a conviction of the inde-
 
 47 
 
 feasible, undying nature of moral good and evil; the 
 real proof that our moral part lives beyond the grave. 
 Is this conviction a freak of our moral natui-e ? This 
 God who is to reign over His own world on condition 
 that He does not govern it, what is He? The su- 
 preme law of nature ? Then let us call Him by His 
 right name. Supposing Him distinct from the law of 
 natui'e, is He above it or beneath it ? H He is above 
 it, why is He bound to observe it in His dealings 
 with the spii'it of man? Why may there not be 
 a whole sphere of existence, embracing the rela- 
 tions and the communion between God and man, with 
 which natural science has no concern, and in which 
 her dictation is as impertinent as the dictation of 
 theology in physics ? Why may not spiritual expe- 
 rience and an approach to the divine in character be 
 necessary means of insight into the things of the 
 spiritual world, as scientific instruments and scien- 
 tific skill are necessary means of insight into the 
 things of the material world ? 
 
 If you give us an hypothesis of the world, let it 
 cover the facts. The religious theory of the world 
 covers all the facts; the physical view of the world 
 covers the physical facts alone. 
 
 And after all, what is this adamantine barrier of 
 law built up with so much exultation between man 
 and the source from which hitherto all the goodness 
 and beauty of human life has sprung ? In the first 
 place, what right has inductive science to the term 
 lato ? Inductive science can discover at most only 
 general facts ; that the facts are more than general, 
 that they are universal, in a word, that they are 
 laws, is an assumption for which inductive science, 
 while she instinctively builds on it, can herself supply
 
 48 
 
 no basis. I need not tell my hearers how she has 
 attempted it by the hand of a great logician, or 
 how utterly the attempt has failed. Let her weave 
 mazes of thought, observe upon observation, induce 
 upon induction as she will, she will find the ground 
 of universals and the basis of science to be instinctive 
 reliance in the wisdom and unity of the Creator. And 
 thus science, instead of excluding the supernatui'al, 
 does constant homage to it for her own existence. 
 
 In the second place, what is the sum of physical 
 science ? Compared with the comprehensible universe 
 and with conceivable time, not to speak of infinity and 
 eternity, it is the observation of a mere point, the ex- 
 perience of an instant. Are we warranted in found- 
 ing anything upon such data, except that which we 
 are obliged to found on them, the daily rules and 
 processes necessary for the natural life of man ? We 
 call the discoveries of science sublime ; and truly. 
 But the sublimity belongs not to that which they 
 reveal, but to that which they suggest. And that 
 which they suggest is, that through this material glory 
 and beauty, of which we see a little and imagine 
 more, there speaks to us a Being whose nature is akin 
 to ours, and who has made our hearts capable of such 
 converse. Astronomy has its practical uses, without 
 which man's intellect would scarcely rouse itself to 
 those speculations ; but its greatest result is a reve- 
 lation of immensity pervaded by one informing mind ; 
 and this revelation is made by astronomy only in the 
 same sense in which the telescope reveals the stars to 
 the eye of the astronomer. Science finds no law for 
 the thoughts which, with her aid, are ministered to 
 man by the starry skies. Science can explain the 
 hues of sunset, but she cannot tell from what urns of
 
 49 
 
 pain and pleasure its pensiveness is poured. These 
 things are felt by all men, felt the more in proportion 
 as the mind is higher. They are a part of human 
 nature ; and why should they not be as sound a basis 
 for philosophy as any other part ? But if they are, 
 the solid wall of material law melts away, and through 
 the whole order of the material world pours the in- 
 fluence, the personal influence, of a spirit correspond- 
 ing to oui' own. 
 
 Again, is it true that the fixed or the unvarying 
 is the last revelation of science? These risings in 
 the scale of created beings, this gradual evolution of 
 planetary systems from their centre, do they bespeak 
 mere creative force ? Do they not rather bespeak 
 something which, for want of an adequate word, we 
 must call creative effort, corresponding to the effort by 
 which man raises himself and his estate ? And where 
 effort can be discovered, does not spirit reign again ? 
 
 A creatui'e whose sphere of vision is a speck, whose 
 experience is a second, sees the pencil of Eaphael 
 moving over the canvas of the Transfiguration. It 
 sees the pencil moving over its own speck, during its 
 own second of existence, in one particular direction ; 
 and it concludes that the formula expressing that 
 direction is the secret of the whole. 
 
 There is truth as well as vigour in the lines of 
 Pope on the discoveries of Xewton : — 
 
 " Superior beings, when of late they saw 
 A mortal man unfold all Nature's law, 
 Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape, 
 And shewed a Newton as we shew an ape." 
 
 If they could not shew a Xewton as we shew an ape, 
 or a Newton's discoveries as we shew the feats of apish 
 cunning, it was because Newton was not a mere in- 
 
 E
 
 50 
 
 tellectual power, but a moral being, labouring in the 
 service of his kind, and because his discoveries were 
 the reward not of sagacity only, but of virtue. We 
 can imagine a mere organ of vision so constructed by 
 Omnipotence as to see at a glance infinitely more 
 than could be discovered by all the ISTewtons ; but 
 the animal which possessed that organ would not be 
 higher than the moral being. 
 
 Reason, no doubt, is our appointed guide to truth. 
 The limits set to it by each dogmatist, at the point 
 where it comes into conflict with his dogma, are 
 human limits ; its providential limits we can learn 
 only by dutifully exerting it to the utmost. Yet 
 reason must be impartial in the acceptance of data, 
 and in the demand of proof. Facts are not the less 
 facts because they are not facts of sense ; materialism 
 is not necessarily enlightenment ; it is possible to be 
 at once chimerical and gross. 
 
 We may venture, without any ingratitude to science 
 as the source of material benefits and the training- 
 school of inductive reason, to doubt whether the great 
 secret of the moral world is likely to be discovered in 
 her laboratory, or to be revealed to those minds which 
 have been imbued only with her thoughts, and trained 
 in her processes alone. Some, indeed, among the men 
 of science who have given us sweeping theories of 
 the world, seem to be not only one-sided in their 
 view of the facts, leaving out of sight the phenomena 
 of our moral nature, but to want one of the two facul- 
 ties necessary for sound investigation. They are acute 
 observers, but bad reasoners. And science must not 
 expect to be exempt from the rules of reasoning. We 
 cannot give credit for evidence which does not exist, 
 because if it existed it would be of a scientific kind ;
 
 61 
 
 nor can we pass at a bound from slight and precarious 
 premises to a tremendous conclusion, because the 
 conclusion would annihilate the spiritual natui'e and 
 annul the Divine origin of man. 
 
 That the actions of men are, like the events of the 
 physical world, governed by invariable law, and that 
 consequently there is an exact science of man and 
 history, is a theory of which, even in the attenuated 
 form it is now beginning to assume, we have still to 
 seek the proof. But a science of history is one thing ; 
 a philosophy of history is another. A science of his- 
 tory can rest on nothing short of causation ; a philo- 
 sophy of history rests upon connexion ; such connexion 
 as we know, and in every process and word of life 
 assume, that there is between the action and its mo- 
 tive, between motives and circumstances, between the 
 conduct of men and the effect produced upon their 
 character, between historic antecedents and theii' re- 
 sults. So far is the philosophy of history fi'om being 
 a new discovery, that the most meagre chronicle of 
 the middle ages, the painted records of Egyptian 
 kings, as they shew some connexion between events, 
 present the germ of a philosophy ; of the philosophy 
 which, in its highest form, traces the most general 
 connexions, and traces them through the whole his- 
 tory of man. 
 
 The philosophy of history, in its highest sense, as 
 was before said, is the offspring of a great truth 
 which has but recently dawned upon mankind. That 
 truth is the moral unity of the human race ; the 
 softening down of mere dogmatic and ecclesiastical 
 divisions between different parts of Christendom, the 
 intercourse, the moral relation, the treaties and bonds 
 ratified by common appeals to God, into which Chris- 
 
 E 2
 
 52 
 
 tendom has entered with nations beyond its pale, have 
 let in the conviction that virtue and truth, however 
 they may vary in their measure, are in their essence 
 the same everywhere, and everywhere divine. It 
 may be that the growth of this conviction is a more 
 potent cause of the change which we see passing over 
 the face of the world than even the final decay, now 
 visibly going on, of feudal institutions, and of the 
 social system with which they are connected. Its con- 
 sequences, to those who have imagined that the vital 
 faith of man rests on ecclesiastical divisions, are not 
 unattended with perplexity and dismay. But if the 
 Churches of Hildebrand, Luther, and Calvin are pass- 
 ing away, above them rises that Church of pure re- 
 ligion and virtue to which in their controversies with 
 each other they have all implicitly appealed, and 
 which therefore is above them all. A certain man 
 was hung by his enemies blindfold over what he sup- 
 posed to be a precipice, with a rope in his hands ; he 
 clung till his sinews cracked, and he had tasted the 
 bitterness of death ; then, letting go the rope, he found 
 that he had been hanging but half-a-foot from the 
 ground. 
 
 Moral discoveries are generally followed by ex- 
 aggeration. The unity of the human race has been 
 exaggerated into identity; and a strange vision has 
 arisen of an aggregate humanity, of which each man 
 is a manifestation and an organ, and into which we at 
 death return; the difference between death and life 
 being, that the one is an objective the other a subjective 
 existence. This wild realism is broached, singularly 
 enough, by a school of thinkers who pour contempt on 
 metaphysical articles. It is, in fact, part of a desperate 
 attempt to satisfy the religious instincts of man and
 
 05 
 
 his sense of immortality, when an irrational philosophy, 
 discarding all sources of truth but the observation of 
 the outAvard sense, has cut off the belief in the invisible 
 world and God. Among the evidences of religion the 
 fact that the blankest scientific atheism has been com- 
 pelled to invent for itself a kind of divinity and a kind 
 of spiritual world, and to borrow the worship of the 
 Eoman Catholic Church, will not hold the lowest place. 
 
 No one can doubt, if he would, that through the 
 life of each of us there is carried a distinct line of 
 moral identity, along which the retrospective con- 
 science runs. No one can persuade himself that this 
 line breaks off at death, so that when a man dies it 
 ceases to signify what his particular life has been. 
 No one can divest himself of the sense of individual 
 responsibility, or imagine himself, by any effort of 
 fancy, becoming a part of the mass of humanity and 
 ceasing to be himself. 
 
 It is not the less certain that we are in a real and 
 deep sense " members one of another ;" and that moral 
 philosophy may gain new truth and additional power 
 by taking the philosophy of history into its counsels, 
 and contemplating not only individual humanity but 
 the whole estate of man. 
 
 The progress of the human race is a truth of which 
 everyday language is full ; one which needs no logical 
 proof and no rhetorical enforcement. That the products 
 of human action, thought, contrivance, labour, do not 
 all perish with their authors, but accumulate from 
 generation to generation, is in itself enough to make 
 each generation an advance upon that which went 
 before it. The movement of history is complex. We 
 asked in a former lecture what was its leading part, 
 and found reason to think that it was the gradual
 
 64 
 
 elevation of the human character, to which all the 
 other parts of the movement, intellectual and material, 
 conduce. The rival claims of intellect to be the leading 
 object in the history of humanity, though strongly put 
 forward, will scarcely bear examination. Intellect may 
 be used for good and it may be used for evil ; it may be 
 the blessing of humanity or the scourge ; it may ad- 
 vance the progress of mankind, as it did when wielded 
 by Luther, or retard it, as it did when wielded by 
 Bonaparte. "Whether it shall be used for good or 
 evil, whether it shall be the blessing of humanity or 
 the scourge, whether it shall advance progress or retard 
 it, depends on the moral character of the possessor, 
 which determines its employment. And this being 
 the case, intellect must be subordinate to moral cha- 
 racter in history. 
 
 Character, indeed, seems to be the only thing within 
 the range of our comprehension for the sake of which 
 we can conceive God having been moved to create man. 
 We needlessly put a stumbling-block in our own way 
 by importing into the divine nature the stoic notion of 
 self-sufficing happiness. The highest nature which we 
 can conceive is not one which disdains, but one which 
 needs affection : and worthy affection can only spring 
 from or be excited by a character of a certain kind. 
 The supposition that man was created to love his 
 Creator and to be the object of his Creator's love ac- 
 cords with our conceptions both of God and man. It 
 does not accord with our conception of God to suppose 
 that He created man with such capacity for suffering as 
 well as for happiness, and placed him in such a world as 
 this, merely to make an exhibition of His own power 
 or to glorify Himself. To make an exhibition of power 
 belongs to the restlessness of mortal strength, not to
 
 55 
 
 the completeness and calmness of Omnipotence. To 
 seek glory belongs to weak human ambition : and 
 equivocal indeed would be the glory of creation if the 
 history of man were to be its measure. One historian 
 after another sets himself to write the panegyric of his 
 favourite period, and each panegyric is an apology or 
 a falsehood. 
 
 Our hearts acquiesce, too, in the dispensation which, 
 instead of creating character in its perfection, leaves 
 it to be perfected by effort. We can conceive no 
 character in a created being worthy of affection which 
 is not produced by a moral struggle ; and on the other 
 hand, the greater the moral difficulties that have been 
 overcome, the more worthy of affection does the cha- 
 racter seem. Try to conceive a being created morally 
 perfect without effort ; you will produce a picture of 
 insipidity which no heart can love. 
 
 And effort is the law, if law it is to be called, of 
 History. History is a series of struggles to elevate 
 the character of humanity in all its aspects, religious, 
 intellectual, social, political, rising sometimes to an 
 agony of aspiration and exertion, and frequently fol- 
 lowed by lassitude and relapse, as great moral efforts 
 are in the case of individual men. Those who espouse 
 the theory of necessary development as the key to 
 history are driven to strange consequences. They 
 are compelled to represent the torpid sensualism of 
 the Eoman Empire as an advance upon the vigorous 
 though narrow virtue of the Eepublic. I see not how 
 they escape from allowing, what with theii* historical 
 sympathies they would not be disposed to allow, that 
 in the history of our own country the Restoration is 
 an advance upon the Puritan Republic. The facts of 
 history correspond better with our moral sense if we
 
 66 
 
 take the view that the awakening of moral life in the 
 race, as in the man, often manifests itself in endea- 
 vours which are overstrained, chimerical, misdirected, 
 higher than the general nature can sustain, and that 
 upon these endeavours a reaction is apt to ensue. 
 During the reaction some of the intellectual fruits of 
 the crisis may be gathered in, but the moral nature 
 languishes; though the elevation of the moral type 
 gained by the previous effort does not perish, but is 
 gained for ever, and, so far as it is true, enters for 
 ever as an exalting influence into the thoughts and 
 lives of men. 
 
 But here another problem presents itself, which may 
 be beyond our power fully to solve, but as to which 
 we cannot forbear to ask, and may possibly obtain, 
 some satisfaction. In the material and intellectual 
 world we are content to see order and design. The 
 law of gravitation, the laws of the association of ideas, 
 so far as they go, perfectly satisfy our minds. But in 
 history it is otherwise. Here we are not satisfied 
 with the discovery of a law, whether of development 
 or of effort; we desire, we cannot help desiring, to 
 see not only order and design, but justice. 
 
 We look over history. We see the man almost 
 pitilessly sacrificed to the race. Scarcely any great 
 step in human progress is made without multitudes of 
 victims. Each pulling down of worn-out institutions 
 brings perplexity and suffering on that generation, 
 however pregnant with good it may be to the next. 
 Every great change of opinion is accompanied, to one 
 generation, by the distress of douljt. Every revolu- 
 tion in trade or industry, however beneficent in its 
 results, involves sufferings to the masses which the 
 world is long in learning how to avert. In the rude
 
 57 
 
 commencements of government and law what evils do 
 men endure from tp-anny and anarchy ! How many 
 of the weaker members of the race perish of want and 
 cold before feeble invention can bridge the gulf be- 
 tween savage and civilized life ! 
 
 It is difficult to doubt that in the early ages of the 
 world races are brought forward to take the lead in 
 history by the cruel test of pre-eminence in war and 
 success in conquering the neighbouring races. To 
 primitive tribes, and even to nations long civilized but 
 not yet penetrated with the sense of our common hu- 
 manity, conquest seems no crime, but either a natural 
 appetite or an heroic enterprise; and in the earliest 
 ages the circumstances of savage hordes are such that 
 they are inevitably driven on each other, or on the 
 neighbouring nations, in quest of fi-esh hunting-fields, 
 new pastures, or richer and sunnier lands. The human 
 race reaps from this process a moral as well as a phy- 
 sical benefit. There is a connexion, not clearly traced, 
 yet certain, between the stronger qualities in human 
 character, such as courage, and the tenderer qualities, 
 such as mercy, while conversely there is a certain con- 
 nexion between cowardice and cruelty ; and the moral 
 as well as the physical basis of humanity requires to 
 be laid in fortitude and strength. 
 
 In philosophy and science, again, the race, like the 
 man, advances by the trial of successive hypotheses, 
 which are adopted and rejected in turn till the true 
 one is at length found. In these successive trials and 
 rejections, with the mental efforts and sacrifices they 
 involve, humanity gains, what no sudden illumination 
 could give it, large spiritual experience and a deep 
 sense of the value of truth. But error is the portion 
 of those generations by whom the false hypotheses are
 
 58 
 
 tried. Nor is this process confined to the domain of 
 mere intellectual truth ; theories of life and modes of 
 self-culture are in like manner tried and found im- 
 practicable or incomplete, at the expense of thousands, 
 among whom are often numbered the flower of man- 
 kind. What efPusion of blood, what rending of affec- 
 tions, what misery has been undergone to try out the 
 question between different theories of society and go- 
 vernment, each of which was plausible in itself ! What 
 an expenditure of high and aspiring spirits was neces- 
 sary to prove that the monastic and contemplative life, 
 in spite of its strong natural attractions, was not prac- 
 ticable for man ! 
 
 Cast your eyes over the world, and see how the 
 masses of men, how the majority of nations, labour not 
 only in mental but in moral degradation to support 
 a high and fine type of humanity in the few. Ex- 
 amine any beautiful work of art, and consider how 
 coarse and dark is the life of those who have dug its 
 materials, or the materials for the tools which wrought 
 it, out of the quarry or the mine. Things absolutely 
 essential to intellectual progress are furnished by 
 classes which for ages to come the great results of 
 intellect cannot reach, and the lamp which lights the 
 studies of a Bacon or Leibnitz is fed by the wild, rude 
 fisherman of the I^orthern Sea. 
 
 It is true that wherever service is rendered, we may 
 trace some reciprocal advantage, either immediate or 
 not long deferred. The most abstract discoveries of 
 science gradually assume a practical form, and descend 
 in the shape of material conveniences and comforts to 
 the masses whose labour supported the discoverer in 
 intellectual leisure. Nor are the less fortunate ages 
 of history and the lower states of society without their
 
 59 
 
 consolations. The intervals between great moral and 
 intellectual efforts have functions of their own. Im- 
 perial Eome, amidst her moral lassitude, makes great 
 roads, promotes material civilization, codifies the law. 
 The last century had no soul for poetry, but it took 
 up with melody, and produced the Ilandels and Mo- 
 zarts. Lower pains go with lower pleasures, and the 
 savage life is not without its physical immunities and 
 enjoyments. The life of intense hope that is lived in 
 the morning of great revolutions, may partly make up 
 for the danger, the distress, and the disappointment of 
 their later hour. But these, if they are touches of kind- 
 ness and providence in Nature, welcome as proof that 
 she is not a blind or cruel power, fall far short of 
 the full measure of justice. 
 
 There are nations which have lived and perished 
 half civilized, and in a low moral state, as we may be 
 sure was the case with Egypt, and have played but 
 a humble part, though they have played a part, in the 
 history of the world. There are races which have be- 
 come extinct, or have been reduced to a mere remnant, 
 and whose only work it has been to act as pioneers for 
 more gifted races, or even to serve as the whetstone 
 for their valoui* and enterprise in the conflict of pri- 
 mitive tribes. There are other races, such as the 
 negro races of Africa, which have remained to the pre- 
 sent time, without progress or apparent capability of 
 progress, waiting to be taken up into the general move- 
 ment by tlieir brethi'en who are more advanced, when, 
 in the coui'se of Providence, the age of military enter- 
 prise is past, and that of religious and philanthropic 
 entei-prise is come. They wait, perhaps, not in vain ; 
 but, in the interim, do not myriads live and die in 
 a state little above that of brutes ?
 
 60 
 
 The question then is, Can we find any hypothesis in 
 accordance with the facts of history which will recon- 
 cile the general course of history to our sense of jus- 
 tice ? I say, to our sense of justice. I assume here 
 that man has really been created in the image of God ; 
 that the morality of man points true, however remotely, 
 to the morality of God; that human justice is iden- 
 tical with divine justice, and is therefore a real key to 
 the history of the world. "If," says Clarke, "justice 
 and goodness be not the same in God as in our ideas, 
 then we mean nothing when we say that God is neces- 
 sarily just and good ; and for the same reason it may 
 as well be «aid that we know not what we mean, when 
 we affirm that He is an intelligent and wise Being ; 
 and there will be no foundation at all left on which 
 we can fix anything. Thus the moral attributes of 
 God, however they be acknowledged in words, yet in 
 reality they are by these men entirely taken away; 
 and, upon the same grounds, the natural attributes may 
 also be denied. And so, upon the whole, this opinion 
 likewise, if we argue upon it consistently, must finally 
 recur to absolute atheism." Either to absolute athe- 
 ism or to the belief in a God who is mere power, 
 and to religion which is mere submission to power, 
 without moral sympathy or allegiance. 
 
 I will not turn aside here to combat the opposite 
 theory. I will merely observe by the way that these 
 things have their history. If the doctrines of any 
 established Church are not absolute and final truth, 
 its corporate interests are apt ultimately to come into 
 collision with the moral instincts of man pressing on- 
 wards, in obedience to his conscience, towards the 
 further knowledge of religious truth. Then arises a 
 terrible conflict. To save their threatened dominion,
 
 61 
 
 the defenders of ecclesiastical interests use, while they 
 can, the civil sword, and wage with that weapon 
 contests which fill the world with worse than blood. 
 They massacre, they burn, they torture, they drag 
 human nature into depths of deliberate cruelty which, 
 without their teaching, it could never have known ; 
 they train men, and not only men but women, to look 
 on with pious joy while frames broken with the rack 
 are borne from the dungeon of the Inquisition to its 
 pile. Uniting intrigue with force, they creep to the 
 ear of kings, of courtiers, of royal concubines ; they 
 consent, as the price of protection, to bless and sanc- 
 tify despotism in its foulest form ; they excite bloody 
 wars of opinion against nations struggling to be free. 
 Still, the day goes against them ; humanity asserts its 
 power ; executioners fail ; sovereigns discover that it 
 little avails the king to rule the people if the Ma- 
 gian is to rule the king ; public opinion sways the 
 world, and the hoiu' of Philip II., of Pere la Chaise, 
 of Madame De Maintenon, is gone never to return. 
 Then follows a hopeless struggle for the last relics 
 of religious protection, for exclusive political privi- 
 leges, and for tests ; a struggle in which religion is 
 made to appear in the eyes of the people the con- 
 stant enemy of improvement and of justice, — religion, 
 from whom all true improvement and all true justice 
 spring. This struggle, too, approaches its inevitable 
 close. Then recourse is had, in the last resort, to 
 intellectual intrigue, and the power of sophistry is 
 invoked to place man in the dilemma between sub- 
 mission to an authority which has lost his allegiance 
 and the utter abandonment of his belief in God — a 
 desperate policy; for, placed between falsehood and 
 the abyss, humanity has always had grace to choose
 
 62 
 
 the abyss, conscious as it is that to fly from false- 
 hood, through whatever clouds and darkness, is to fly 
 to the God of truth. In weighing the arguments put 
 before us on these questions, let us not leave out of 
 sight influences whose fatal power history has re- 
 corded in her bloodiest page. 
 
 Assuming, then, that human justice is the same 
 quality as divine justice, the idea of moral waste in 
 the divine government, as displayed in history, is 
 one in which we shall never force our hearts to ac- 
 quiesce. If moral beings are wasted by the Creator, 
 what is saved ? Butler, indeed, suggests the analogy 
 of physical nature, and intimates that we may ^re- 
 sign ourselves to the waste of souls as we do to the 
 waste of seeds. But in the case of the seed nothing 
 is wasted but the form ; the matter remains inde- 
 structible; while misery and despair there is none. 
 The analogy of animals, on which Butler elsewhere 
 touches in a different connexion, seems more formid- 
 able. Here are beings sentient, to a certain extent 
 intelligent, and capable of pleasure and pain like our- 
 selves, among whom good and evil seem to be dis- 
 tributed by a blind fate, regardless of any merits or 
 demerits of theirs. The only answer that can at pre- 
 sent be given to the question thus raised seems to be 
 this : that we are not more certain of our own exist- 
 ence than we are that no fate or law regardless of 
 morality rules us; and that as to animals, their des- 
 tiny is simply beyond our knowledge. Was man to be 
 placed in the world alone ? Was he to be left without 
 the sentiments and the moral influences which spring 
 from his relations with his mute companions and help- 
 mates ? Or could he, the heir of pain in this world, 
 be placed amidst a painless creation, without destroy-
 
 03 
 
 ing the sympathy of things ? It may bo observed, too, 
 that in tlie state of a large portion of the animal crea- 
 tion there seems to be a progressive improvement, not 
 taking the form of physical development, but depend- 
 ing on and bearing a faint analogy to the improve- 
 ment of the human race. As the human race sj^reads 
 over the world and cultivates it, the carnivorous and 
 ferocious animals disappear, and those more peaceful 
 and happier tribes remain which are domesticated by 
 man. If man himself should become, as some seem to 
 expect, less carnivorous as he grows more civilized, 
 his relations with animals will of course become still 
 more kindly, and theii' lot still better. This remark 
 docs not go far ; it applies only to a portion of the 
 animal creation. But so far as it goes, it tends to 
 prove that animals are not under blind physical law, 
 but under providential care ; and it suggests a sort 
 of development, if that word is to be used, very dif- 
 ferent from the organic development which a certain 
 school of science is seeking everywhere to establish. 
 Rational enquiries into the nature, character, and lot 
 of animals seem to be but just beginning to be made ; 
 and in their course they may clear up part of that 
 which is now dark. Meantime, mere defect of know- 
 ledge is no stumbling-block. There is a faith against 
 reason which consists in believing, or hypocritically 
 pretending to believe, vital facts upon bad e^^dence, 
 when our conscience bids us rest satisfied only with 
 the best ; but there is also a rational faith which con- 
 sists in trusting, where our knowledge fails, to the 
 goodness and wisdom, which, so far as our knowledge 
 extends, are found worthy of our trust. 
 
 Butler, while he built his whole system on analogy, 
 declined to enquii'e strictly what the logical force of
 
 64 
 
 analogy was. The real ground of his great argument 
 seems to be this — that the dealings of the same Being 
 (in this instance the Creator) may be expected always 
 to be the same ; which is true, with this momentous 
 qualification, that the thing dealt with must be the 
 same also. There is not only no assurance, there is not 
 even the faintest presumption that, as God deals with 
 seeds, so He will deal with lives ; or that, as He deals 
 with mortal lives, so He will deal with immortal souls. 
 The only analogy really applicable to these matters 
 seems to be that of the moral nature of man, on which 
 its Maker has impressed His own image, and which, 
 when at its best, and therefore likest Him, shrinks 
 from the thought of moral waste, and if it is com- 
 pelled to inflict suffering by way of punishment, does 
 so not to destroy but to save. The passage of Origen, 
 of which Butler's analogy is an expansion, is taken 
 from the literature of an age not too deep-thinking or 
 too deep-feeling to endure the idea of an arbitrary God. 
 To us that idea is utterly unendurable. If we could 
 believe God to be arbitrary, above the throne of God 
 in our hearts would be the throne of justice. If we 
 translate Origen' s words into philosophic language, do 
 not they, and does not the argument which Butler has 
 based on them, come to this, — that God is bound to 
 deal with the spiritual as He deals with the material 
 world ? And if this is true, is He not a fate rather 
 than a God ? 
 
 We cannot help divining, then, that the true hypo- 
 thesis of history will be one which will correspond to 
 our sense of justice. But where can such an hypo- 
 thesis be found? Is there any colour of reason for 
 adopting a view of history which would suppose a 
 deeper community of the human race as to its object
 
 05 
 
 and its destiny, than common language implies, and 
 which would stake less than is commonly assumed to 
 be staked on the individual life ? 
 
 To such a view seem to point all the instincts which 
 lead man to sacrifice his individual life to his fellows, 
 his country, and, when his vision becomes more en- 
 larged, to his kind. These instincts are regardless of 
 the state of moral perfection at which he whom they 
 propel to destruction has personally arrived. They do 
 not calculate whether the soldier who rushes first into 
 the breach, the man who plunges into a river to save 
 one who is drowning, the physician who loses his own 
 life in exploring an infectious disease, is, to use the 
 common phrase, fit to die. They seem distinctly to 
 aim at a moral object beyond the individual moral life, 
 and affecting the character of the race. Yet at the 
 same time they give strong assurance to him whose 
 life they take that it is good for him to die. 
 
 That desire of Kving after death in the grateful 
 memory of our kind, or, as we fondly call it, of im- 
 mortality, to which the enjoyment of so many lives is 
 sacrificed, is it a mere trick of nature to lure man to 
 labour against his own interest for her general objects ? 
 Or does it denote a real connexion of the generation 
 to which the hero, the writer, the founder belongs 
 with the generations that will succeed ? 
 
 Again, what is it that persuades the lowest and 
 most suffering classes of society, when the superiority 
 of physical force is on their side, to rest quiet beneath 
 their lot, and forbear from breaking in with the strong 
 hand upon civilization, which in its tardy progress aWU 
 scarcely bring better times to their children's children, 
 and has too plainly no better times in store for them ? 
 Is it not an instinct which bids them respect the des- 
 
 p
 
 66 
 
 tinies of the race ? And why should they be bidden 
 to respect the destinies of the race, if those destinies 
 are not theirs ? 
 
 Why this close interlacing of one moral being with 
 the rest in society, if after all each is to stand or fall 
 entirely alone? Why this succession of ages, and 
 this long intricate drama of history, if all that is to be 
 done could have been done as weU by a single set of 
 actors in a single scene ? 
 
 If each man stood entirely alone in his moral life, 
 unsupported and unredeemed by his kind, nature, the 
 minister of eternal justice, would surely be less lavish 
 of individual life, and of all that is bound up in it, 
 than she is. At least, she would shew some disposi- 
 tion to discriminate. Those myriads on whom, through 
 the accidents of war, changes and failures of trade, 
 earthquakes, plagues, and famines, the tower of Siloam 
 falls, as we know they are not sinners above all the 
 Galileans, so we can scarcely think that they, above 
 all the Galileans, are prepared to die. 
 
 Society is the necessary medium of moral develop- 
 ment to man. Yet even society, to serve its various 
 needs, sacrifices to a great extent the moral develop- 
 ment of individual men. It is vain to say that those 
 who are put, through life, to the coarsest uses, the 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water to the social 
 system, can rise to the highest and most refined moral 
 ideal ; though we know that in merit towards society 
 they are, and are sure that in the eye of God they 
 must be, equal to those who do. Delicacy of senti- 
 ment, which is essential to our notion of the moral 
 ideal, can scarcely exist without fineness of intellect, 
 or fineness of intellect without high mental cultiva- 
 tion. And if we were to say that the want of that
 
 G7 
 
 which high mental culture confers is no loss, we should 
 stultify all oui* own efforts to promote and elevate 
 education. Even the most liberal callings carry with 
 them an inherent bias scarcely compatible with the 
 equable and flawless perfection which constitutes the 
 ideal. Busy action and solitary thought are both 
 necessary for the common service ; yet inevitable 
 moral evils and imperfections beset alike those who 
 act in the crowd and those who think alone. Each 
 profession has its point of honour, requisite for social 
 pui-poses, but overstrained with regard to general mo- 
 rality, and naturally apt to be accompanied by some 
 relaxation of the man's general moral tone. We for- 
 give much to a soldier for valour in the field, much to 
 a judge for strict integrity on the bench of justice ; 
 and we can hardly expect that the conscience of the 
 soldier or the judge will not admit into its decisions 
 something of the same indulgence. Did not the 
 strictest of Universities choose as her Chancellor 
 a man of the world, a man of pleasure, and a dueUist, 
 because as a soldier and a citizen he had done his 
 duty supremely well ? 
 
 Does it follow that the moral law is to be relaxed 
 on any point, or that any man is to propose to him- 
 self a lower standard of morality in any respect ? 
 No ; it only follows that in forming our general views 
 of man and his destiny we must limit our expecta- 
 tions of individual perfection, and seek for compen- 
 sation in the advancement of the kind. We must 
 in the main look for the peculiar virtues of the re- 
 ligious pastor elsewhere than in the camp or at the 
 bar ; though when the virtues of the religious blend 
 with those of the busy and stirring life, we feel 
 that the highest aspii'ation of nature is fulfilled. It 
 
 f2
 
 G8 
 
 may be that advancing civilization will soften down 
 inequalities in the moral condition of men, and di- 
 minish the impediments to self-improvement which 
 they present ; but we can scarcely expect that it will 
 efface them, any more than it will efface the moral 
 differences attendant upon difference of sex. 
 
 In the passionate desire to reach individual perfec- 
 tion, and in the conviction that the claims of society 
 were opposed to that desire, men have fled from society 
 and embraced the monastic life. The contemplative 
 and ascetic type of character alone seemed clear of all 
 those peculiar flaws and deformities to which each 
 of the worldly types is liable. The experiment has 
 been tried on a large scale, and under various condi- 
 tions ; by the Buddhist ascetics ; in a higher form by 
 the Christian monks of the Eastern Church; and in 
 a higher still by those of the West. In each c^se 
 the result has been decisive. The monks of the West 
 long kept avenging nature at bay by uniting action of 
 various kinds with asceticism and contemplation, but 
 among them, too, corruption at last set in, and proved 
 that this hypothesis of life and character was not the 
 true one, and that humanity must relinquish the uni- 
 form and perfect type which formed the dream of 
 a Benedict or a Francis, and descend again to variety 
 and imperfection. 
 
 Variety and imperfection are things, the first of 
 which seems necessarily to involve the second. Yet 
 the taste which prefers variety to sameness, even in the 
 moral world, is so deeply rooted in our nature, that if 
 taste means anything, this taste would seem to have its 
 source and its justification in the reality of things. 
 
 Separate, too, entirely the destinies of man from 
 those of his fellow, and you will encounter some per-
 
 69 
 
 plexing questions, not to be avoided, touching the 
 strong cases of natural depravity which occur among 
 the most unfortunate of our kind. Actual idiocy may 
 be regarded as destroying humanity altogether. But 
 are there not natural depravities, moral and intellec- 
 tual, short of idiocy, which preclude the attainment of 
 any high standard of character, and forbid us to make 
 the moral destiny of these beings too dependent on 
 the individual life ? 
 
 Our common notions, which make the moral life so 
 strictly individual, seem to depend a good deal on the 
 belief that each man is, morally, not only a law but 
 an independent and perfect law to himself. But is 
 this so ? Is the voice of individual conscience inde- 
 pendent and infallible ? Do we not, in doubtful cases, 
 rectify it by consulting a friend, who represents to 
 us the general conscience of mankind ? Of what is 
 it that conscience speaks ? Is it of abstract right 
 and wrong? Are not these conscience itself under 
 another name? Moralists, therefore, support con- 
 science, and give it meaning by identifying it with 
 universal expediency, with the fitness of things, with 
 the supreme will of the Creator. Universal expe- 
 diency and the fitness of things are ultimate and dis- 
 tant references, if they are not altogether beyond the 
 range of our vision. The will of God as an object 
 distinct from morality seems altogether to defy our 
 power of conception. Would conscience retain its 
 authority if it were not more immediately supported 
 by human sympathy, love, and reverence, through 
 which the Maker of us all speaks to each of us, and 
 which are bestowed in virtue of our conformity to 
 a type of moral character preserved by the opinion 
 and affection of the race ? The sympathy, love, and
 
 70 
 
 reverence of our kind are, at all events, objects of 
 a real desire and incitements to virtuous action, which 
 the philosophic definitions of morality, however high- 
 sounding, can scarcely be said to be. 
 
 Common language divides virtues and vices into 
 the social and the self-regarding. But are there any 
 purely self-regarding virtues or vices ? Does not tem- 
 perance fit us and intemperance unfit us to perform 
 the duties of life towards our kind? Is it easy to 
 preach temperance and denounce intemperance very 
 powerfully except by reference to the claims and opi- 
 nion of society ? Would a man be very clearly bound 
 to give up an enjoyment which injures himself alone ? 
 It is sometimes said of a good-natured spendthrift and 
 voluptuary that he was only his own enemy. We 
 have not to look far to see that he must have been 
 the enemy of all about him, and of society. But if 
 the statement were true it would almost disarm the 
 censure of mankind. 
 
 The question whether virtue be enlightened and 
 deep self-love, which has been rather glossed than 
 solved, may perhaps be partly solved by experiment. 
 You preach against incontinence, for instance, on 
 grounds of personal purity, and your preaching pi;oves 
 not very eff'ective. Try a different course. Preach 
 against incontinence on the ground of pity for its 
 victims, and see whether that motive will be more 
 availing. 
 
 That there is a complete and independent moral 
 code innate in each of us, is an opinion which it is 
 difficult to hold when we see how much the special 
 precepts of the moral law have been altered by social 
 opinion for the best members of society in the course 
 of history. Piracy, wars of conquest, duelling, for
 
 71 
 
 example, were once approved by the moral code ; they 
 are now condemned by the improved code which 
 has sprung from the enlarged moral views and more 
 enlightened conscience of mankind. I say that the 
 special precepts of the moral code are altered ; I do 
 not say that the essence of morality changes. The 
 essence of morality does not change. Its immutability 
 is the bond between the hearts of Homer's time and 
 ours. The past is not without its image in the pre- 
 sent. Suppose a young London thief, such as Defoe 
 has painted, kind-hearted, true to his comrades in 
 danger and distress, making a free and generous 
 use of his plunder, and in his depredations having 
 mercy on the poor. It is plain that the boy would 
 be much better if he did not steal, as he wiU him- 
 self see, directly he is taught what is right. It is 
 plain, on the other hand, that he is not a bad boy, 
 that (to apply the most practical test) you can nei- 
 ther hate nor despise him ; that on the whole he 
 does more good than evil in the world. The evil he 
 does even to property is slight, compared with that 
 which is done by rich idlers and voluptuaries, since 
 while he steals a little they taint it all. Not that the 
 moral law does not include property as an essential 
 precept, but that the essence of morality lies deeper 
 than the special precepts of the moral law. 
 
 Where the essence of morality lies, history must 
 wait to be taught by ethical science. Till she is 
 taught, it is impossible that she can form her phi- 
 losophy on a sound basis ; and, therefore, those who 
 are devoted to historical studies may be excused for 
 impatiently desiring a more rational enquiry into this, 
 the central secret of the world. It is not by verbal 
 definitions, however philosophic in appearance, that
 
 72 
 
 we shall ascertain what morality really is. We must 
 proceed by a humbler method. Does morality lie in 
 action, or in character ? Do not actions, similar in 
 themselves and equally voluntary, change their moral 
 hue as they spring from one character or another ? 
 Are not crimes committed from habit, at once the 
 least voluntary and the most culpable ? and is not the 
 paramount importance of character, of which habitual 
 action is the test, the account of this paradox ? Is 
 not the same action, if done by a character tending 
 upwards, regarded as comparatively good ? if by a 
 character tending downwards, as comparatively evil ? 
 Is it not, in short, as indications of character, and on 
 that account only, that actions excite our moral emo- 
 tions, as distinct from our mere sense of social inte- 
 rest ? And if this be so, is it not rather in character 
 than in action that morality lies ? If it is, we must 
 analyze the phenomena of character by some rational 
 method. There are two sets of qualities, one of which 
 excites our reverence, the other our love ; and which 
 tend to fusion in the more perfect characters, but as 
 a character never reaches perfection, are never com- 
 pletely fused. What is the common ingredient of these 
 two sets of qualities ? What is the common element 
 in the hero and the saint ? What connects grandeur 
 of character with grace ? What, in short, are our 
 several moral tastes, and what and how related are 
 the different points of character that attract and repel 
 them ? In the case of doubtful characters, such as that 
 of a Wallenstein, or that of an Othello, what is it that 
 constitutes the doubt? what is it that turns the scale? 
 Which of the vices are more, which less, destructive 
 of beauty of character? and what is it that deter- 
 mines the difference of their effects ? If deliberate
 
 73 
 
 cruelty, for instance, is the worst, the most unpardon- 
 able of vices, may it not point to the prime source of 
 moral excellence in the opposite pole ? These are 
 questions which seem at least to present rational start- 
 ing points for enquiry, and to be capable of being 
 handled by a rational method ; and they must be ra- 
 tionally handled before we can construct a real phi- 
 losophy of history — perhaps it may be added, before 
 moral philosophy itself can become fruitful, and pass 
 from airy definition to the giving of real precepts for 
 the treatment of our moral infirmities and the attain- 
 ment of moral health. The school which regards his- 
 tory as the evolution of a physical organization under 
 a physical law, is ready with a multiplicity of hypo- 
 theses, furnished by the analogy of physical science. 
 The school which regards history as the manifesta- 
 tion and improvement of human character through free 
 action is in suspense for want of some sounder and 
 more comprehensive account of human character than 
 has yet been supplied. 
 
 On the other hand, history, as we have said, may 
 lend light to the moral philosopher. He cannot fail 
 to be assisted and guided by contemplating not indi- 
 vidual humanity only, but the whole estate of man. 
 Some things become palpable on the large scale, which, 
 in examining the single instance, do not come into 
 view, or may be overlooked. History forces on our 
 notice, and compels us to take reasonably into account, 
 the weakness, the necessary imperfections, the various 
 and unequal lot, the constraining circumstances, the 
 short, precarious life of man. In history, too, beside 
 the tragic element of human life, there plainly appears 
 another element, which may not be without its sig- 
 nificance. Whenever an historian gives us a touch of
 
 74 
 
 genuine humour, we recognise in it a touch of truth. 
 Humour, the appreciation of what is comic in man 
 and his actions, is a part of our moral nature ; it is 
 founded on a kind of moral justice ; it discriminates 
 crime from weakness ; it tempers the horror which 
 the offences of a Louis XIY. excite, with a smile, 
 which denotes the allowance due to a man taught by 
 his false position and by his sycophants to play the 
 god. In its application to the whole lot of man, and 
 to the lot of each man, it may perhaps be thought to 
 suggest that the drama is not pure tragedy, and that 
 all is not quite so terrible or so serious as it seems. 
 
 There is no doubt that all this points, not by any 
 means to a lower morality, but to a somewhat lower 
 estimate of the moral powers of individual man ; to an 
 attainable ideal, and to the deliberate love of human 
 characters in spite of great imperfections, if on the 
 whole they have tended upwards, and done, in their 
 measure, their duty to their kind. And is not man 
 more likely to struggle for that which is within than 
 for that which is beyond his reach ? If you would 
 have us mount the steep ascent, is it not better to 
 shew us the first step of the stairs than that which 
 is nearest to the skies ? If all the rhetoric of the 
 pulpit were to be taken as literally true, would not 
 society be plunged in recklessness, or dissolved in 
 agonies of despair? A human morality saves much 
 which an impracticable morality would throw away; 
 it readily accepts the tribute of moral poverty, the 
 fragment of a life, the plain prosaic duty of minds 
 incapable from their nature or circumstances of con- 
 ceiving a high poetic ideal. On the other hand, it 
 has its stricter side. It knows nothing of the merits 
 of mere innocence. It requires active service to be
 
 75 
 
 rendered to society. It holds out no salvation by 
 wearing of amulets or telling of beads. Eegarding 
 man as essentially a social being, it bears hard on 
 indolent wealth, however regular and pious ; on sine- 
 curism in every sense ; on all who are content to live 
 by the sweat of another man's brow. It teaches that 
 to be undei-paid is better than to be overpaid ; and 
 that covetousness and grasping, though they may not 
 violate the law, are a robbery, at once immoral and 
 fatuous, of the common store. 
 
 There is little fear, let us say once more, lest any 
 man, not a victim to the mad mysticism into which 
 materialism is apt to be hurried by the Nemesis of 
 reason, should imagine himself divested of his distinct 
 personality, or of his distinct personal responsibility, 
 and merged in the aggregate of humanity, or in the 
 universe of which humanity is a part. It is difficult 
 to express such reveries in the language of sane men. 
 But that the human race is, in a real sense, one ; that 
 its efforts are common, and tend in some measure to 
 a joint result ; that its several members may stand 
 in the eye of their Maker, not only as individual 
 agents, but as contributors to this joint result, — is 
 a doctrine which our reason, perhaps, finds something 
 to support, and which our hearts readily accept. It 
 unites us not only in sympathy but in real interest 
 with the generations that are to come after us, as well 
 as with those that have gone before us ; it makes each 
 generation, each man, a partaker in the wealth of all J 
 it encourages us to sow a harvest which we shall reap, 
 not with our own hands, indeed, but by the hands of 
 those that come after us ; it at once represses selfish 
 ambition and stimulates the desire of earning the 
 gratitude of our kind; it strengthens all social, and
 
 76 
 
 regulates all personal desires ; it limits, and by limit- 
 ing sustains effort, and calms the passionate craving 
 to grasp political perfection or final truth ; it fills up 
 the fragment, gives fruitfulness to effort apparently 
 wasted, and covers present failure with ultimate suc- 
 cess; it turns the deaths of states, as of men, into 
 incidents in one vast life; and quenches the melan- 
 choly which flows from the ruins of the past, — that 
 past into which we too are sinking, just when great 
 things seem about to come.
 
 POSTSCEIPT. 
 
 The doctrine of Clarke as to the identity of human 
 and divine justice, to which I have subscribed in 
 this lecture, and without which it seems to me that 
 history and the whole moral world would be re- 
 duced to chaos, is controverted, in the supposed in- 
 terest of revealed religion, by the learned and dis- 
 tinguished author of the Bampton Lectures for 1858, 
 who (p. 206, 3rd ed.) comes to the conclusion that 
 "human morality, even in its highest elevation, is 
 not identical with, nor adequate to measure, the Ab- 
 solute Morality of God." If this be so, I venture to 
 submit, with Clarke, that the " morality of God" is 
 an ■ utterly unmeaning phrase, or that, if it means 
 anything, it means the immorality of God ; human 
 morality and human immorality being the only two 
 ideas which our minds can possibly form upon the 
 subject, or which our language can possibly express. 
 
 If there are two Moralities, a Divine and a Human, 
 which may indefinitely conflict with each other, (and 
 as we " are unable to fix in any human conception" 
 what the divine morality is, we cannot fix any 
 definite limit to their conflict,) there is, in effect, no 
 morality at all. 
 
 Elsewhere (Lect. viii., p. 244,) the Lecturer, in spite 
 of his decision that the moralities of God and man are 
 not identical, shews a desire to reconcile divine with 
 human morality in regard to certain actions attri-
 
 78 
 
 buted to God, of which the morality is disputed. 
 This he does by introducing a doctrine of moral 
 miracles, which isolates the actions in question from 
 the divine nature and character, and thus saves the 
 divine morality in human eyes. It would have been 
 more consistent to say that the actions, being in- 
 stances of divine, not of human morality, were not 
 to be reconciled with our moral perceptions. A mi- 
 racle in the ordinary sense is a breach of the natural 
 law : a moral miracle, by analogy, must be a breach 
 of the moral law. Why should not a criminal at the 
 bar, instead of making a bad defence, say that he has 
 performed a moral miracle ? 
 
 ''That there is an Absolute Morality, based upon, 
 or rather identical with, the Eternal I^^ature of God," 
 says the Lecturer, in a passage immediately preceding 
 that which I first quoted, " is indeed a conviction 
 forced upon us by the same evidence as that on which 
 we believe that God exists at all. But what that 
 Absolute Morality is we are as unable to fix in any 
 human conception as we are to define the other at- 
 tributes of the same Divine ^Nature." To believe in 
 the existence of that which we " are unable to fix in 
 any human conception," and to believe in its relation 
 to and identity with another thing (which, according 
 to the Lecturer, is equally beyond our conception), 
 will, I believe, be found, on the most conscientious 
 experiment, a feat impossible to the human mind. 
 The "conviction" may be "forced" upon the Lec- 
 turer, if he wishes to avoid the tremendous conse- 
 quences of his theory, but he cannot, without giving 
 us new understandings, " force" it upon us. 
 
 By thus denying the identity of Human and Divine 
 morality, we cut away, as Clarke truly observes, all
 
 79 
 
 arguments for the immortality of the soul which are 
 founded on divine justice. If we know nothing of 
 the absolute justice of God, what presumption is there 
 that it will lead Him to redress the sufferings of the 
 good in a future state of existence ? 
 
 It fares with truth as with morality. " The highest 
 principles of thought and action, to which we can at- 
 tain, are regulative^ not speculative ; they do not serve 
 to satisfy the reason, but to guide the conduct ; they 
 do not tell us what things are in themselves, but how 
 we must conduct ourselves in relation to them." — (p. 
 141.) " It is thus strictly in analogy with the me- 
 thod of God's Providence in the constitution of man's 
 mental faculties, if we believe that in religion also 
 He has given us truths which are designed to be 
 regulative rather than speculative ; intended not to 
 satisfy our reason, but to guide our practice ; not to 
 tell us what God is in His absolute nature, but how 
 He wills that we should think of Him in our pre- 
 sent finite state." — (p. 143.) If there is no truth at- 
 tainable by man but "regulative truth," there is no 
 truth attainable by man at all. "Eegulative truth" 
 is a nonentity. A rule may be such as it is necessary 
 to obey, but it cannot, in the proper sense, be true. 
 Is not the substitution of the uncommon and incor- 
 rect phrase "regulative truth" for the common word 
 "rule," prompted by an instinctive reluctance to ex- 
 hibit the terrible image of an Almighty Master in 
 place of a moral God ? 
 
 It may be true that " action and not knowledge is 
 man's destiny and duty in this life." — (p. 149.) But 
 that to which the Lecturer reduces the state of man 
 is action without knowledge; the state of mere phy- 
 sical agents.
 
 80 
 
 That " there is a higher and unchangeable principle 
 embodied in these forms" (p. 209) is a welcome doc- 
 trine ; but to say that we " have abundant reason to 
 believe it" is to assume that we not only can attain, 
 but transcend, the limits of the highest " speculative" 
 truth. It is to assume that we can pronounce not 
 only on the existence but on the "embodiment" in 
 certain forms of that which " we are unable to fix 
 in any human conception." 
 
 Morality and truth are gone, and God hardly re- 
 mains. If God is " inconceivable " (p. 171) I fail to 
 apprehend how we can believe in Him : my mind, 
 though conjured in the name of " duty," is unable to 
 present to itself the existence of anything of which I 
 have no conception. Still more obvious does it seem 
 to me that I cannot, with the nature that is given me, 
 revere and love a Being who reveals Himself to me, 
 not as He is, but under " regulative representations." 
 ■ — (p. 150.) The Lecturer, indeed, (p. 145,) lays it 
 down as matter of " faith " that " the conceptions 
 which we are compelled to adopt as the guides of our 
 thoughts and actions now, may indeed, in the sight of 
 a higher Intelligence, be but partial truth, but cannot 
 be total falsehood." God's own representation of Him- 
 self to man cannot be totally false ! "Why not totally 
 false as well as partly false ? Who has assured the 
 Lecturer that the " conceptions " which we are " com- 
 pelled to adopt" bear to the reality any relation ex- 
 pressible by the human terms ' truth ' and ' false- 
 hood' ? But supposing it to be ascertained that they 
 are only in part false ; how are we to know which part 
 is the truth, which the falsehood ? To what are our 
 hearts to turn as the real object of our religious affec- 
 tion ? From what are they to turn away (they cannot
 
 81 
 
 choose but turn away) as the "falsehood" and the 
 mask? 
 
 Is the Church of England prepared to say of Christ 
 that He was to the Apostles a ' regulative representa- 
 tion,' 'not totally false,' of the Divine Natui-e? 
 
 In asserting that conceptions which God compels 
 man to adopt cannot be total falsehood, the Lecturer, 
 it seems to me, is doing that which he warns us against 
 presuming to do : he is constructing " a Philosophy 
 of the Absolute." He is, in like manner, constructing 
 a philosophy of the Absolute when he undertakes to 
 say (p. 242) that " it is one thing to condemn a reli- 
 gion on account of the habitual observance of licen- 
 tious or inhuman rites of worship, and another to pro- 
 nounce judgment on isolated facts, historically re- 
 corded as having been done by divine command, but 
 not perpetuated in precepts for the imitation of pos- 
 terity." How, but by transcending what he lays 
 down as the limits of human thought, can he be 
 assured that the difference between the Divine and 
 the Diabolical nature is this, that whereas the Dia- 
 bolical nature is habitually criminal, the Divine na- 
 ture commits only isolated crimes ? 
 
 If he says that it is the " regulative " ill effect 
 of habitually inhuman and licentious religions that 
 proves them not to be divine, where but in a Phi- 
 losophy of the Absolute does he find the sanction of 
 that particular criterion? From what other source 
 can he have learnt that " facts " " done by divine 
 command," though not expressly "perpetuated in pre- 
 cepts," are not intended " for the imitation of pos- 
 terity ?" He tells us (p. 211) that " there are limits 
 within which alone" the rule of the suspension of 
 human duties by God " can be safely applied." Is
 
 82 
 
 "safely" to be taken as having reference to our 
 personal convenience, or to what he is taught by 
 the philosophy of the Absolute respecting the nature 
 of things ? 
 
 In another place (p. 240) the Lecturer says, "We 
 are indeed bound to believe that a revelation given 
 by God can never contain anything that is really 
 unwise or unrighteous." Here, again, he seems to be 
 constructing a philosophy of the Absolute. "Eeal 
 wisdom. " and " real righteousness " must be used in 
 a sense intelligible to us, or we could not possibly be 
 " bound " to have any belief about them ; but with- 
 out a philosophy of the Absolute how can we tell 
 that everything in a revelation given by God must 
 be really wise and righteous in a sense intelligible to 
 us? The "duty" implied in the word "bound" can 
 have its sanction only in that philosophy which the 
 Lecturer has declared to be impossible. 
 
 There is one passage of the lectures in which, if I 
 do not misapprehend its import, a belief in God is 
 actually proved to be impossible to the human mind. 
 " Sensation without thought would at most amount 
 to no more than an indefinite sense of uneasiness or 
 momentary irritation, without any power of discern- 
 ing in what manner we are affected, or of distin- 
 guishing our successive affections from each other. 
 To distinguish, for example, in the visible world, 
 any one object from any other, to know the house 
 as a house, or the tree as a tree, we must be able 
 to refer them to distinct notions ; and such refer- 
 ence is an act of thought. The same condition holds 
 good of the religious consciousness also. In what- 
 ever mental affection we become conscious of our 
 relation to a Supreme Being, we can discern that
 
 83 
 
 consciousness, as such, only by reflecting upon it as 
 conceived under its proper notion. "Without this, we 
 could not know our religious consciousness to be what 
 it is ; and, as the knowledge of a fact of consciousness 
 is identical with its existence, without this, the reli- 
 gious consciousness, as such, could not exist." — (p. 
 107.) Is there any "proper notion" analogous to the 
 " notion" of a " house" under which our relation to 
 a Supreme Being can be conceived ? And if there is 
 none, does it not follow from the Lecturer's reasoning 
 that this " fact of religious consciousness " cannot be 
 known, and therefore that it cannot exist ? Is not the 
 argument in effect this — 'We can have no distinct 
 knowledge of anything, unless we can refer it to 
 a class of objects, and thus distinguish it in our minds 
 from objects of a different class; and that of which 
 we have no distinct knowledge has to our minds 
 no existence. Now there is no class of objects to 
 which we can properly refer God ; therefore we can 
 have no distinct knowledge of God ; therefore to 
 our minds God has no existence.' In his apologetic 
 Preface (p. xix.) the Lecturer says, ''A negative idea 
 by no means implies a negation of all mental activity. 
 It implies an attempt to think, and a failure in accom- 
 plishing the attempt." But I presume it also implies 
 a failure to love, revere, and commune with that which 
 is a mere negative idea. And, what the Lecturer does 
 not seem to observe, it implies a failure to recognise 
 or receive any sort of revelation. Eevelation is the 
 voice of God. How can we know the voice, if the 
 Speaker is unknown ? 
 
 Again, when we are told (p. 144) in regard to our 
 capability of knowing God, that " we behold effects 
 only, and not causes," the natural import of this ex-
 
 84 
 
 pression surely is, that we are cognizant of creation, 
 only, not of a Creator. I do not wonder that ma- 
 terialists should have received these lectures with 
 approbation, as well as bishops. It is to blank mate- 
 rialism and empiricism that such reasonings inevit- 
 ably lead. 
 
 Morality, truth, God, are swept away. Nothing is 
 left but the bare, hard text of Scripture, as a brazen 
 regulator thrust into the world by an almighty Power, 
 to compel us to move in a certain way, without refer- 
 ence to the moral reason which God has given us, 
 however rash some divines may think it in Him to 
 have done so. And this "regulative truth" has been 
 inserted into the world piece by piece, at long inter- 
 vals of time. A portion of truth is truth ; but a frag- 
 ment of a rule is no rule at all. 
 
 Is such a revelation as this a revelation indeed, or 
 an obscuration of God ? 
 
 Scripture is not to commend itself by the divine 
 character of its contents, for this would be making 
 men able to discern and appreciate what is divine. 
 "The legitimate object of a rational criticism of re- 
 vealed religion is not to be found in the contents of 
 that religion, but in its evidences. ^^ — (p. 234.) And 
 the only evidences left to us, it would seem, are the 
 miracles, considered as exhibitions of power. To con- 
 sider them as exhibitions of divine love, and put them 
 forward as evidences in that respect, would be to con- 
 struct a philosophy of the Absolute ; for it would be to 
 assume that love, human love, is divine, and its exhi- 
 bition a note of divinity. All the internal evidences 
 fall under the same fatal objection ; being all moral, 
 they all involve the assumption that human morality 
 is identical with the morality of God. The miracles,
 
 85 
 
 as evidences of power, alone remain; and the Scrip- 
 ture itself says that miracles of power may be dia- 
 bolical as well as divine. 
 
 If the words of Scripture are '' regulative represen- 
 tations" of the divine nature, and if the moral notions 
 signified by them are not our moral notions, they will 
 become rather sacred amulets than words. Their sanc- 
 tity and efficacy will depend on their exact identity. 
 Can we be certain that they will bear translation into 
 another human language ? What becomes of the Gos- 
 pel of St. Matthew, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 which have probably not been transmitted to us in 
 the original tongue ? Can we venture to interpret the 
 "regulative representation" of the inconceivable? or 
 must we simply keep it with reverence as an ancile 
 which has fallen from the skies? Deductions from 
 Scripture seem to be quite out of the question. At 
 one point (p. 2) the Lectui'er is seized with a just mis- 
 giving that his scythe has swept away the Athanasian 
 Creed. He therefore throws in a saving clause for 
 " the mere enunciation of religious truths, as resting 
 upon authority, and not upon reasoning." But what 
 is this " authority," and how is it established ? Is it 
 in possession of a philosophy of the Absolute, that it 
 should be able to say which among the " regulative re- 
 presentations" of Scripture are a proper subject for the 
 human process of deduction ? Further on (p. 5) the 
 Lecturer stigmatizes as dogmatists those " who seek to 
 build up a complete scheme of theological doctrine out 
 of the unsystematic materials furnished by Scripture, 
 partly by the more complete development of certain 
 leading ideas ; partly by extending the aj^parent im- 
 port of the Eevelation to ground which it does not 
 avowedly occupy, and attempting by inference and
 
 86 
 
 analogy to solve problems which the sacred volume 
 may indeed suggest, but which it does not directly 
 answer; partly by endeavouring to give additional 
 support to the scriptural statements themselves, treat- 
 ing them as truths, not above, but within the grasp of 
 reason, and capable of demonstration from rational pre- 
 mises." Eepudiate "the development of leading ideas," 
 " the extension of the apparent import of revelation," 
 " the solution by inference or analogy of problems 
 suggested but not answered by the sacred volume," 
 and what justification is left for the framers of the 
 Athanasian Creed, not to say of the Mcene ? I should 
 have thought that the passage was directly intended 
 to cut away every possible ground from under their 
 feet. When we take up "weapons" in defence of 
 a good cause, we must take care that they have not 
 a double edge. 
 
 You go to a heathen whom you wish to convert, 
 and say, 'You must not judge of my religion by 
 its contents, for they are beyond your judgment, but 
 by its evidences, which are the miracles.' May not 
 he answer, ' My religion is said to be attested by mi- , 
 racles as well as yours, and the questions of historical 
 criticism, on the one side and on the other, are such 
 as I have neither time, learning, nor capacity to solve. 
 Besides, according to your own Scriptures, Egyptian 
 sorcerers and false prophets can perform miracles, so 
 that I do not see how miracles by themselves can esta- 
 blish the truth of a religion.' Or rather, supposing 
 him to have any notion of religion, would he not say, 
 ' If your religion is to be judged, not by its contents, 
 but by its evidences, it must be the lowest and vilest 
 religion in the world.' 
 
 Spinoza, in his Tractatiis Theologico-Politiciis (c. 15),
 
 87 
 
 after setting forth the discrepancy between Scripture 
 and reason, proceeds to consider their relative claims. 
 The "Sceptics," he says, bend Scripture to reason; 
 the " Dogmatists" bend reason to Scripture. He re- 
 jects both these courses, and concludes, " quod nee 
 theologia rationi, nee ratio theologise ancillari teneatur, 
 sed unaqu8Dque suum regnum obtineat ; nempe uti 
 diximus, ratio regnum veritatis et sapientise, theologia 
 autem pietatis et obedientias." He has before (c. 13) 
 demonstrated to his own satisfaction, " Scripturam non 
 nisi simplicissima docere, nee aliud praeter obedientiam 
 intendere ; nee de divina natura aliud docere, quam 
 quod homines certa vivendi ratione imitari possunt." 
 The Mephistophelic language of the Arch-pantheist 
 seems in a fair way to become the orthodox theory of 
 revelation. 
 
 Any attempt to determine the relative spiritual 
 value of the different parts of the regulative truth con- 
 tained in the Scriptures, becomes as vain and rash as 
 interpretation and deduction. I^ot only "if you reject 
 one jot or one tittle of the whole doctriue of Christ" 
 must you pronounce the whole an imposture, (p. 249,) 
 but if you doubt the literal accuracy or the perfect 
 authenticity of one jot or one tittle of any part of the 
 Bible, the authority of the whole is gone. ""We may 
 not divide God's Eevelation." A trifling discrepancy, 
 a passage of questionable genuineness, may deprive 
 Han of Eevelation and of God. 
 
 But the most formidable difficulty still remains. 
 If the exact canon of Scripture is everything, what 
 is the exact canon of Scripture, and who is its ap- 
 pointed guardian ? Philosophy, we are told, " speaks 
 with stammering lips and a double tongue." The voice 
 of the Churches is not perfectly clear or one. The
 
 88 
 
 Churcli of Eome includes the Apocrypha in the neces- 
 sary sum of '^ regulative truth." The Church of Eng- 
 land pronounces for their exclusion. There are no 
 miracles to decide the question ; and the Lecturer is 
 a man of too much sense to suppose that it can be 
 decided for each man by the accident of his birth. As 
 to the Anglican Canon, the Article, we know, states 
 that there never was any doubt in the Chiirch about 
 the authority of any of the books contained in it. But 
 the histories which contradict the Article as to the 
 matter of fact require elaborate confutation. If we 
 can know God, and know His voice, these difficulties 
 are as nothing ; if we cannot know God, they are 
 death. 
 
 Finally, Scripture itself is directly at issue with the 
 philosophy, or negation of philosophy, on which, accord- 
 ing to the Lecturer, its exclusive authority is founded. 
 It sets out with the declaration, the solemn and repeated 
 declaration, that man was created in the image of his 
 Maker; whereas the negative philosophy proves that 
 the morality of man is not identical with the absolute 
 morality of God, and consequently that the moral 
 nature of God cannot be imaged in that of man. The 
 Author of Christianity bids us pray God to forgive 
 us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass 
 against us ; a direct appeal to an analogy between 
 the human and divine nature. On the other hand, 
 the Bampton Lecturer says (p. 214) that "it is ob- 
 vious, on a moment's reflection, that the duty of man 
 to forgive the trespasses of his neighbour rests pre- 
 cisely upon those features of human nature which 
 cannot by any analogy be regarded as representing 
 an image of God." I have read what the Lecturer 
 has said in his answer to Mr. Maurice, but there is
 
 89 
 
 no escaping" the contradiction. The clause in the 
 Lord's Prayer is not an appeal to human sinfulness, 
 but to Divine sympathy, and to a similarity, in the act 
 of free forgiveness, between the human nature and the 
 Divine. The Lecturer's inflexible logic has led him 
 into a dilemma not unlike those into which the great 
 Jesuit doctors were led (most innocently as I believe) 
 thi'ough their unwary reasonings from premises ori- 
 ginally commended rather by their adaptation to the 
 weakness of human nature than by their abstract 
 truth. 
 
 Let it be at once said, however, that throughout 
 these Lectures, with the dark growth of the negative 
 philosophy, there twines, in happy contradiction, a more 
 wholesome plant, attesting the real geniality of the 
 soil beneath. In the more rhetorical passages (as at 
 p. 190) the Christian preacher gives the cold doctrines 
 of the negative philosopher to the .winds, and admits 
 implicitly that there are firm, independent grounds 
 for natural religion. Again, (at p. 248,) he places 
 among the evidences of Christianity the character 
 of its Founder ; whose portrait he there, embracing 
 the better philosophy, acknowledges that we can pro- 
 nounce to be Divine, 
 
 It is therefore the less necessary to follow him into 
 the metaphysical labyrinth which he has constructed 
 for himself and his hearers. By turning a notion 
 really negative, such as " infinity," into a positive 
 notion, and bringing it into antagonism with its sup- 
 posed opposite, you may make mental puzzles enough 
 for a long summer's day. The soundest as well as 
 the simplest way of approaching the question is to 
 begin by enquiring, not whether there can be a Phi- 
 losophy of the Absolute or of the Infinite, but whether 
 the pure in heart see God. 
 
 H
 
 90 
 
 I will add two remarks, which, perhaps, occur to 
 me especially as a student of history. 
 
 The fii'st remark is this. The blow which in these 
 Lectures kills natural religion is dealt through the 
 side of German philosophy. I am quite prepared to 
 believe that German philosophy is scholasticism, not 
 science ; that it reasons from arbitrary notions ; and 
 that it has borne, and will bear, no fruit. It is, 
 perhaps, neither the only nor the last philosophy of 
 which this might be plausibly affirmed. If it founds 
 religion on pure metaphysics and logic, it falls into 
 an absurdity equalled only by that of attempting to 
 prove the impossibility of religion on purely meta- 
 physical or logical grounds. But history owes it 
 thanks for a great and noble effort to give Europe 
 a moral faith at a time when all faith had been swept 
 away by the corruption of the clergy and the de- 
 structive criticism of Yoltaire. Fichte may have run 
 into extravagances ; but think that he devoted his 
 intellect to the support of a high, disinterested mo- 
 rality in the age of Talleyrand and Bishop Pretty- 
 man, and you will be inclined, if you can be touched 
 by the weakness of humanity, to strew flowers upon 
 his grave. 
 
 The second remark is this. Before you decide, on 
 metaphysical grounds, to what degree of religious 
 knowledge man can attain, it may be useful to en- 
 quire, historically, what degree he has actually at- 
 tained. It may be well to consider the natural re- 
 ligion of Plato, and still more that of Marcus Au- 
 relius and Epictetus, before you pronounce that no 
 natural religion is possible, beyond a blind craving 
 for support and expiation. History is a mere string 
 of facts without moral philosophy ; and, without his- 
 tory, moral philosophy is apt to become a dream.
 
 91 
 
 Nor, while I adhere to the doctrine opposed to that 
 of the Lecturer, in regard to his main position, will I 
 conclude these brief observations on his theory without 
 paying the humble tribute of my sincere admiration 
 to the power of statement displayed in some parts 
 of his book. I may allude especially to a passage 
 in his first lecture, where, in vindicating the repre- 
 sentation of God given in the Bible, he demolishes 
 the figment, much in vogue among exclusively sci- 
 entific minds, of an insensible, inflexible, immovable, 
 in a word, of a scientific, as opposed to a moral, God. 
 It is one thing to use controversial weapons borrowed 
 from negative philosophy; it is another thing to be 
 yourself a negative philosopher. 
 
 ^ritrfeb b» p^fssrs. Igarher, Cornmarkt, ©rforb.
 
 y^:^^r^< 
 
 smm 
 
 m