complete dearth. The most deserving are Clarendon's Great Rebellion, Burnet's Own Times, and his Reformation. The first, a Royalist, is a professed apologist of one side. His style, often prolix, is on the whole manly; with sometimes a majesty and beauty hitherto unknown. The chief merit of the second is liveliness and perspicuity. His style, though careless and familiar, partakes fairly of the improvements of his time.

The advancing spirit of scepticism was purging history of its falsehoods. We have traced its progress from poetic narration; and ere long we shall see it pass into philosophical interpretation, look beneath the surface of events for the springs of action, search under facts for principles, becoming more humane and democratic as it becomes more critical and just. It is important to understand well the significance of this tendency; for if the historical method advances, it is because general knowledge advances; if the way of contemplating the past is different, it is because the way of contemplating the present is different. Each is a phase of the same vast movement.

Theology. The spirit which Bacon carried into philosophy, Cromwell into politics, and Chillingworth into theology, now culminated in open revolt. Belief in a God, coupled with disbelief in a written revelation, became frequent. Lord Herbert, brother of the saintly poet, may be considered the founder of the English school of deists. All religions are by him reduced to one, which is sufficient, he maintains, for all the wants of mankind. This universal system consists of five articles:

1. That there is one supreme God.

2. That He is to be worshipped.

3. That piety and virtue are the principal part of His worship.

4. That man should repent of sin, and that if he does so, God will pardon it.

5. That there are rewards for the good, and punishments for the evil, partly in this life, and partly in the next.

In that political and religious reaction which followed the Cromwellian period, Deism arose in its extreme forms, frequently allied with the democratic, sometimes with the revolutionary, tendencies of the nation. Hobbes, however, the greatest living

anti-Christian writer, was a servile advocate of royalty and of the right of the state to coerce individual opinions: 'Thought is free, but when it comes to confession of faith, the private reason must submit to the public, that is to say, to God's lieutenant.' He acknowledges the being of God, but denies that we know any more of Him than that He exists:

By the visible things of this world and their admirable order, a man may conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God, and yet not have an idea or image of Him in his mind. And they that make little inquiry into the natural causes of things are inclined to feign several kinds of powers invisible, and to stand in awe of their own imaginations. And this fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.'

He also denies free-will; asserts the materiality of the soul, and teaches that the belief in a future state is merely a belief grounded on other men's saying that they knew it supernaturally, or that they knew those, that knew them, that knew others, that knew it supernaturally.' He cuts with remorseless knife at the very heart of the general faith. To say God hath spoken to man in a dream, is no more than to say man dreamed that God hath spoken to him.' 'To say one hath seen a vision or heard a voice, is to say he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking.' These statements, one and all, are but applications of his metaphysical theory, which, in connection with its results, will be considered in its proper place.

The common ferment bred an astonishing irruption of deists,Shaftesbury, Toland, Tindal, Mandeville, Bolingbroke; but, from Hobbes downward, Deism grew more and more materialistic and sensual. As might be expected, its career was transient. Fifty years after the Revolution, it was drowned in forgetfulness. For the system which it proposed to abolish, it could offer, in its highest type, no substitute but lofty and dissolving speculation, impotent at least in that stage of civilization-to supply motives and means for right conduct.

Free-thinkers roused antagonists: leaders of experimental science, as Boyle and Newton; illustrious scholars, as Bentley and Clarke; popular wits, as Addison and Swift; profound philosophers, as Cudworth and Locke. Apologies, refutations, expositions abounded and multiplied. The character of theological literature, however, had changed. In all this discussion, quotations are comparatively rare. Christians no longer combated by

authority, but by argument. An incessant reference to proof had indisposed the public to receive the traditions that had once enslaved their fathers. It is observable, too, that the progress of Arminianism, as opposed to Calvinism, was changing the face of the English Church. This was displayed among those who, about the epoch of the Restoration, were commonly known as Latitudinarians, distinguished from High Churchmen by their strong aversion to every compromise with Popery,― and from most Puritans as well, by their opposition to dogma, by their insistence upon rightness of life rather than correctness of opinion, by their advocacy of tolerance and comprehension as the basis of Christian unity. The questions most freely discussed or illustrated by divines were 'The Bible the only rule of faith,' and 'Salvation by God's free mercy through Christ.'

says one.

In Scotland, the stronghold of Presbyterianism, induction was unknown, bigotry was undiminished, secular interests were neglected, preaching was harsh and gloomy. The misery of man, the anger of the Deity, the power and presence of Satan, the agonies of hell, were still the constant themes of the pulpit. The preacher delighted to freeze the blood of his hearers with hideous imagery. 'Boiling oil, burning brimstone, scalding lead,' 'A river of fire and brimstone broader than the earth,' says another. Tongue, lungs, and liver, bones and all, shall boil and fry in a torturing fire,' says a third. There is no end of such language: 'Oh! the screeches and yels that will be in hell.' 'While wormas are sporting with thy bones, the devils shall make pastime of thy paines.' 'There are two thousand of you here to-day, but I am sure fourscore of you will not be saved.” In the absence of scientific knowledge, and of that rationalistic spirit which was liberalizing and enlightening thought elsewhere, all phenomena were referred to the arbitrary will of a passionate and sanguinary God. As long as this continued, as long as religious feelings were chiefly associated with the abnormal and capricious, attention would chiefly concentrate upon disasters, and devotion would be chiefly connected with storm and pestilence, famine and death. These, regarded as penal inflictions, would give a congenial hue to all parts of belief, whose central ideas would be misery, cruelty, and terror. But when habits of

1 In consequence three persons are said to have dispatched themselves in despair.

PROSE ENGLISH MATERIALISM.

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investigation acquire the ascendancy, calamities are seen to be the result of general laws, terrorism diminishes, attention is directed chiefly to the evidences of superintending care, the Divine presence is associated with order, and theology wears a more beneficent aspect. This, on the whole, is precisely the change that had been going on in England from the early part of the century. The fact suggests, what must be obvious to every careful student of ideas,—that all theology is progressive: Christianity lives because it is developed. Every age must produce its own doctrines, adapted to its peculiar condition and wants. Those of the present can be retraced to the successive points of time when, one after the other, they reached a definite form. Patristic― Scholastic-Reformative-modern Evangelical—this is the line of advance and the order of growth. The gems alone are unmodified, the eternal verities, the same to-day, yesterday, and forever.

Ethics. Two classes of tendencies, two complexions or styles of mind, contend for empire in the individual and society,- the one holding of animal force, the other of genius; the one of the understanding, the other of the soul; the one deficient in sympathy, the other warm and expansive; the one all buzz and din, the other all infinitude and paradise; the one hating ideas and clinging to a corporeal civilization, the other looking abroad into universality and suggesting the presence of the invisible gods; the one insisting on sensuous facts as the solid finality, the other on Thought and Will as the primal reality, from which as an unsounded centre flow sensuous facts perpetually outward, and of which they are but a manifold symbol. These are the Materialists and the Idealists of the world. The former think more of the beast than of the seraph in man. The only interests they appreciate are such as are palpable, and can be touched, measured, and weighed. If they survey the rules of conduct, or seek to discover the principles which underlie them, they make much of a good stomach, of strong limbs, of the five senses, and reach the conclusion that the universal motive of every act is the desire of pleasure. In their analysis of moral phenomena, unable to ascend higher than their own level, they stop at self-love. This is precisely what now took place at the birth of moral science. Nor, under the conditions, is it at all surprising. It was natural that

in the hands of a logician and a positivist, driven into exile by rebellion, into weariness and disgust by sectarian violence, attached to a fallen government, and yearning for repose, ethical philosophy should assume a form pleasing to a generation devoted equally to monarchy and to vice; that, written in the midst of an overthrown society and a religious excess, for an audience whose passions and tastes had been sternly repressed, and who mingled duty and fanaticism in a common reproach, it should wipe out noble sentiment and reduce human nature to its merely animal aspect.

Such a theorist was Thomas Hobbes,' and such the base tone which saturates his system. He has daily observed- -as who has not?-that we continually perform acts, because we see that they will issue in pleasure; on the other hand, that we refuse to perform, because we see that they will issue in pain. Preoccupied with favorite ideas, the sight of revolutionary excess confirms him in his principles and attachments. He accordingly declares that a desire to obtain pleasure and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action. None seek or wish for anything but that which is pleasurable:

'I conceive that when a man deliberates whether he shall do a thing or not do it, he does nothing else but consider whether it be better for himself to do it or not to do it.'

With him, as with the courtiers around him, 'the greatest good is the preservation of life and limb; the greatest evil is death.' In what, then, does all the good or evil of objects consist? Solely in their property of producing happiness or the opposite. 'Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions.' To determine the quality of an act, you have simply to acquaint yourself with its fitness or unfitness to produce pleasure. Calculate well, therefore, and you are moral; calculate ill, and you are immoral. All passions are thus resolved into one-love of self. What is reverence? The conception we have concerning another that he hath the power to do unto us both good and hurt, but not the will to do us hurt.' What is love? A conception of the utility of the person loved. Why are friendships good? 'Because they are useful; friends serve for defence and otherwise.'

1 'Our Saviour, God-man, had been born one thousand five hundred and eighty years. In Spanish harbors lay anchored the famous hostile fleet soon to perish in our sea. It was early spring-time, and the fifth day of April was dawning. At this time, I, a little worm, was born at Malmesbury.' He died at the age of ninety-two.