can not be shaken. It is a calm assurance of this security which we hope may possess the breasts of all parties to the theological controversies of the future. This calm as surance will allay all painful excite ment of the public mind, at the announcement of novel opinions. It will insure to those opinions a fair discussion, and to the cause of truth a conclusive determination of them. Every error which does not carry

its own denial on its face, will be refuted by argument, and not blown into importance by the persecution of its advocates. The friends of truth, being calm in the conviction of their strength, will no longer be tempted to defend their positions against the errorist by unlawful weapons. How desirable this assurance is for the peace of the churches in the coming conflicts, we need not say.

LORD BACON deserves the epithet," many-sided," among phi losophers, as Shakespeare does among poets. Not that he advances at one time, an opinion of Epicurus, then another of Plato, and again a third of Zeno; but that the partisans of each sect in philosophy claim the same statements, and assert that the spirit of his philosophy is derived from their own. Nor is he simply a philosopher, as the term has been commonly defined; a cosmopolite, an original, a man of business; one finds it hard to decide whether he has all the "idols," or none. No system of philosophical criticism ranks him high enough to justify at all the impression, which every student of him has of his greatness. We shall have to make a new one, on purpose for him, as the lovers of Shakespeare have for the "myriad minded" poet. Meanwhile some thing may be said from the lawyer's side, or corner. And first, as to the influence of the study of jurisprudence, in producing that "spirit of the age," of which the Baconian philosophy was the expression.

The Protestant Reformation-that first turbulent assertion of the independence of reason, and the worth of man; the gift of soul to the

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masses; the concurrent rise of the lower classes, forcing the common wants of man upon the attention of the learned, and infinitely increasing the practical power of the race; the discovery of America, and of the passage to India, opening a boundless field of labor for these new powers; directing immense energies to commerce; forming new connections; and modifying the manners, industry, and government of the world— necessitated a change in the spirit of the age, from speculation to action. The immense interests thus originated, claimed for their management the highest exertion of a high order of intellect; the necessary effect of this application of intellect to practical affairs, was to produce rules for the conduct of such affairs, and a continual improvement of these rules; while the invention of printing, recording every thing, and publishing every thing, would induce the writing and systematizing of them, and so necessarily lead to a philosophy of action and of progress. The study of jurisprudence was among the causes, which contributed most to urge the advance, and shape the course, of all these events. The Roman law is a science nearly corresponding to the Baconian model.

A few political principles lie at the foundation of it; the application of these principles to particular cases, according to the laws of justice and morality, constitutes the civil code. In digesting this code, the lawyers must have proceeded upon the theory of our common law, where, as in the natural sciences, new rules are not originated and promulgated by absolute authority; but it is taken for granted, that there is a legal right, or body of unwritten laws existing, prior to their delivery and formal adoption in the courts; and a decision determines, not what the law shall be, but what it is. Using the language of science, the judges may be said to discover, in the case of new precedents, what the law is, just as, in investigating natural phenomena, the naturalist discovers natural laws; and the method of discovery is the same, except that as men are not so sure to act according to law, as planets are, and the attention of the judges is directed chiefly to perturbations, it is necessary to place more comparative reliance upon principles before established. The truth of each supposed discovery, is carefully tested by applying it to continual causes; and, if it is found not to answer the ends of justice, it is decided to be no law. The law, then, is a progressive science; having, for its end, the benefit of man; for its means, the protection of his rights of personal security, liberty, and private property; for its method, the continual establishing of new principles, by an examination and comparison of facts and principles already established; for its test of truth, the application of its principles to business.

It will at once be seen, that the extensive and diligent study of such a science must have had a most beneficial effect. As early as the eleventh century, it became very common, and, finally, almost universal throughout Europe. The conquering barbarians, and the con

quered Romans, were now coalescing into new bodies, and the spirit of these laws was the life that was breathed into most of the masses, shaping them into organic wholes, making them states.

Thousands flocked to the principal cities of Italy to study them. All the clergy were learned in them. The enthusiasm was universal. Albertus Magnus makes the blessed virgin herself a civilian and a canonist. "The excellency of an advocate," he says, "lies in three things, to gain a desperate cause, from a just judge, against a wily adversary; but the blessed virgin gained a favorable judgment, Apud judicem sapientissimum; dominum contra adversarium callidisimum, diabolum, in nostra causa desperata.'

This was the only practical learning of the dark ages. The subtle intellects, which would weigh the down from the plumage of an angel's pinions, maintained their relations to this world by the study and practice of the law; and these same intellects, which we sneer at, as we see them dancing, with their thousand spirits, upon a needle's point, should acquire a portentous impor. tance in the eyes of a money-loving age, as they glide through the statutes of mortmain, with the wealth of half a kingdom upon their backs. With the advance of the race in practical power, the study of jurisprudence became more extensive, and more intelligent; while the other learning was engrossed in theology and dialectics, in law alone was found a tolerable substitute for moral and political science. The lawyers led the way in commerce, education, and government; and finally, in the person of Lord Bacon, of philosophy.

Upon the 16th of June, 1573, was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, Francis Bacon, aged 13, fifth son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, a diligent and success.

ful lawyer and statesman; and Anne, his second wife, daughter of Sir Anthony Cook, eminent for her attainments as a linguist and theologian; one of the most learned and delectable ladies of the age.

Master Frank was an excellent scholar; but, though he learned his tasks, he laughed at his teachers. Colleges, always conservative, were then in a dotage, mumbling the wise words of by-gone centuries; conserving the spirit of the dark ages. The whole mind of that young scholar was alive with the spirit of the living present; his heart had already swelled with ambition at sweet words of compliment from Elizabeth; tales of navigators to new and brave worlds, at the setting and the rising sun, had doubtless kindled his imagination; the unspeakable aspirations and hopes of young genius, pregnant with noble conceptions and vast designs, were stirring vigor. ously within him; gorgeous visions, as of a new Atlantis, rolled before his mind like the moving mass of ocean, and a voice was in his soul, crying, onward; as if the billows spoke, as they marched on, and the winds sung it, as they swept ononward! ever onward! He took up the word, and it was the life of a new philosophy. Theologians were still preaching the intellectual depravity, and perpetual deterioration of the race; philosophers were teaching a corresponding lesson; they looked back to Aristotle and Plato, and saw themselves to be but faint reflections of those great lights of science. The pigmy present despaired before the giant past, or strutted behind it, non passibus æquis," in humble imitation.

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we the taller of the two, by adding their height to our own." It was from these, then, already made familiar to him by his father and his uncle at home, that Bacon was imbued, thus early, with the progress. ive spirit.

It was from the same source, that he derived his sentiment of toleration. Indifference seems, sometimes, to have done more to establish truth, than the love of truth itself; as Rousseau says, the atheists of the French Revolution, laid down the purest and highest morality the world had known, because they considered it a mere matter of speculation, in which they had no personal concern. It has been eminently so with this matter of toleration. Papists and Protestants were then alternately murdering each other; schools in philosophy were wrangling with the bitterness of death. The shrewd old lawyers at the head. of the English government, who, to say truth, cared little about religion or philosophy, taught and acted upon the principles of toleration, as far as their own safety would permit. From these, Bacon obtained, we think, that spirit which had already, before he left college, in his sixteenth year, led him to project a reform in philosophy, which should make it progressive and comprehensive; the spirit of progress and tol

eration.

By this time, Bacon had probably arrived at a conception, more or less distinct, of that end of philosophy, which he so eloquently set forth in his later life; the use and comfort of man.

The distinction between his and the former philosophies, will be most distinctly seen by speaking of the end and means together. The ancients had proposed various ends for man, as pleasure, contentment, action-but so far as they proposed to do any thing for these ends, it was by direct education. The Epicurean made men happy, by teaching them

the precepts of Epicurus. The Stoics made men virtuous, by teaching them the precepts of Zeno;-their systems were educative; their means, the development of philosophers. Bacon was content to state his end as the good of man, without troubling himself to discuss the supreme good. He evidently had in mind the legal goods of a thriving citizen in a well ordered state, the virtuous enjoyment of life, liberty, and property; but he objected to no kind of good, except that abstract good, which is good for nothing. His means of attaining this end, was the increase of useful knowledge and useful inventions. He considered these as a sort of hoarded happiness. If they did not render the inventors happy, they would sometime add to the mass of human hap piness. They were happiness solidified, subjected to weight and meas. ure, buying and selling. If Zeno were to look around one of our factories, with its miracles of machinery, and its miserable mannikins of men, he would cry aloud to them with groans, "get more soul !" Bacon would gaze exultingly upon the scene"toil on! toil on! every new fabric will be so much good for some one, no matter whom; so many yards of happiness."

The first advances the individual, but keeps the race stationary. What need of additions to the general stock? That which educated Aristotle, will certainly educate me.

The second neglects the individual, in the race; "and the individ. ual withers, and the world is more and more." The Greek left the school of Socrates intent upon molding himself into such a character as his teacher; our ambition is to discover a planet or a new and useful bug, or to invent a lightning rod, or a safety lamp, or at least, a new organization of society. The Stoic would be something; the Baconian must do something. Here also Bacon shows the lawyer. Theologi

ans have always held the Grecian end and means; they insist upon one supreme good; a spiritual state, in comparison with which, all other good is evil, all other attainment so idle, that he who has reached it may be totally depraved. They are educators also, and look for God's blessing upon the direct application of truth to the soul. Bacon transferred the ends of law to other sciences. How completely these ends engrossed his mind, is no where more distinctly seen than in his constant and bitter charges of barrenness against the old philosophy; for surely he overlooked its aims, when he said that it bore no fruit. Fruit! what fruit should it produce? The groves of Academus were not planted with steam-engines, or lightning rods. Men grew there. Its fruit is to be sought in the men who have matured under its influences-and what a harvest! Was there nothing ripe, and mellow, and juicy in the soul of Plato, on whose infant blossom the honey-bees alighted, and no seed thoughts in the core of his spirit? Was Aristotle nothing, but a choke-pear of disputation? a metaphysical burr, with no meat in the center? Was not Marcus Aurelius a sound and wholesome product? an imperial growth worthy of propagation? Such as these have been the fruits of the Grecian philosophy wherever it has been planted; by the stately palaces of the Medici; by the monasteries of Germany; by the academic halls of England; or, beyond the currents of Oceanus, in the lone wilds of America. Fruit glorious and imperishable! aid and comfort also, through all time, to universal humanity! The method of Bacon, the inductive method, though it had already been pointed out by Aristotle, has been generally considered by philosophers the chief merit of his system. But the legal and political commentators seem disposed to pass it over very slightly. Mac

auley, for example, in his showy and sophistical review, says that "scarcely any person, who proposed to himself the same end with Bacon, could fail to hit upon the same means." However incorrect this opinion may be, it shows how nearly akin the inductive method is to those pursued in the law.

But Bacon added the lawyer's test of truth; its working well. He wanted no truths which could not produce or prophesy, and he judged them by their fruits. Knowledge was truth to him, if he could make nature act, or foretell her courses by it; otherwise, not, a test always sure to give the clearest ideas of causes; but excluding all other relations, an unerring guide to truth in physics, where only truth will act; but in civil business, where, as Bacon himself says, 66 falsehood, like an alloy in coin of gold and silver, may make the metal work the bet ter," it is but a slow guide to purity or truth. It consecrates means for the sake of the end.

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We have spoken of the spirit of the Baconian philosophy, compre hension, and progress; of its end, the good of man; of its means, useful knowledge, and useful inventions; of its method, the inductive process; of its test of truth, the consequences of it and claimed to find, in all these, traces of the study of jurisprudence, not in such a sense, that any good lawyer might have written the Novum Organum, or that a better lawyer would have made a better philosophy. Sir Edward Coke would, doubtless, have made a worse one, but it would have been more like Bacon's, than one by Luther or Erasmus. It is in tracing the history of jurisprudence, and the useful arts alone, that Baconianism seems to grow up naturally; to be the "birth of time;" and it is in these, and the sciences to which they have given rise in the hands of Grotius and Montesquieu, and in political economy and legislation, that the

glory of the Baconian philosophy consists. It has no direct, legitimate claim, to those sublime, but, in Bacon's sense, barren studies, astronomy and geology; for, in conclusion, it savors of the faults, as well as the excellences, of the legal profession.

They may be summed in a sentence. Bacon did not love truth for its own sake, and he denied its relations to God. He was devout, too, in his way; but he held his creed by will, and not by reason; he delighted in absurdities, to use, with Sir Thomas Brown, that odd resolution, learned out of Tertullian— "Credo, quia impossibile." He denied final causes, and so left an unspanned abyss between man and his God.

In the infancy of science, men believed all things made for them; to give them food, the earth was peopled; to give them light, the sun, and moon, and stars, were created; God works for them alone. Then a science of utility is natural; but when the telescope has opened the heavens, depth beyond depth, and the microscope has revealed its wondrous and countless races, and the history of the world has been traced back, ages upon ages, before man was; he sees, with humility, his true relations to the universe, and science, expanding with his thought, embraces beauty, right, and religion, as well as utility.

Lord Bacon clung to this earth, and the old theory of the solar system; but if he be not one of those sublimer souls, who delight to be present in spirit with God, when of old he laid the foundations of the earth, and to raise the voice of praise, with the morning stars, which sang together, or, far through the infinite realms of space, to go sounding on, sphere beyond sphere, forever and forever; as the genius of his philosophy, he is seen moving among the crowds of men, in their marts of business, or legislative