scholastic dreams and gratuitous assumptions, imperfect and blundering both as to speculation and facts, so that it must be considered a retrograde step, either as compared with Bossuet or with De Maistre's spirited, though very one-sided, views on the subject.

66

Amid this distraction an isolated but remarkable position has been taken up by De la Mennais, in his Esquisse d'une Philosophie" (4 vols.), published in 1840, but evidently conceived and composed before 1831. This remarkable work has passed almost unnoticed in France, on account, probably, of the personal position of the author and of the hybrid nature of the system. It is, however, incontestably, not only by far the most important production of that deep thinker and powerful writer, but one of the leading books of the age respecting the human mind. Not that it can be called a philosophy of history. It is simply a philosophical psychology, one which considers man in his primitive relations to God and the universe. It rectifies considerably the views which had been adopted in France and partly in England, respecting first and secondary causes, mind and matter (the latter he well defines as simply expressing negative limitation), and respecting the productions of art, as manifestations of the beautiful, which he takes to be the True manifested in Form. The original conception of the book excludes the philosophy of religion, and even of the state, and presupposes a domain of revealed truth, to be believed on traditional authority, by the side of the domain of reason or philosophy. Such a separation is arbitrary and false, nor is it in harmony with the philosophical position since taken up by that classical writer. But the author still lives, and his work is not finished.

As to Protestant France, Vinet has embodied, in various articles and essays, deep thoughts and noble aspirations on the philosophy of history. The only sign of life in this field, which at present can be noticed, is the general view of Christian philo

sophy taken by the editors of the "Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie Chrétienne;" in one of the last numbers of which (July, 1851) there is an excellent fragment of an unpublished article on the philosophy of history ("La Naissance de l'Eglise") from the pen of M. Trottet.

C+

ELEVENTH CHAPTER.

THE DUTCH, ENGLISH, SCOTCH, AND FLEMISH VIEWS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY.

THE nations which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried out the idea of Christian reforms in the shape of the sovereignty of law over arbitrary power-the Dutch, the English, and the Scotch-have not shone preeminently by their books on the philosophy of history. Their national philosophy of history is written in the immortal pages of their public and domestic institutions, and may daily be read in the sanctuary of a pure family life and in the mutual trust which pervades all their social relations. This is the living monument of their faith in a moral order of the world. As to literature, the Dutch life had a philosophical exponent of this faith in the younger Hemsterhuys. The philosophical school of Flemish Belgium, which took a part in the movement of 1830 for national independence, was Flemish Germanic, not of the Paris school. The year 1827, as the era of the foundation of the Free University at Brussels, marks a period in the history of the European mind, and in French literature, in reference to the philosophy of history. The philosophical school of Belgium is its most eminent product. The patriarch of this school is Van Meenen, whose disciple, Van de Weyer, the editor of the philosophical works of Hemsterhuys, has not ceased to be its most illustrious member by entering into public life. These men have taken up an original and highly important position between the sensualism of Condillac and his successors on one side, and abstract German metaphysics on the other. The Belgian school has now a young and distinguished representative in Tieberghien, as is proved by his

"Essai théorique et historique sur la Génération des Connaissances humaines.”

As to Scotch philosophy, its ethic school, which is its most brilliant part, has chosen for its object the abstract notions of the moral government of the world, rather than the task of bringing under its scope the phenomena of the destinies of mankind. However, we may still hope that the acute author of the "Philosophy of the Conditioned," Sir William Hamilton, will give us the application of his method to a problem which must always have been before his mind. To throw down the wall of separation between philosophy and Christianity will necessarily be the first step in this direction.

England has in this century returned to the course indicated rather than traced by Bacon. The first name which history has to mention in this department is that of Coleridge, a man greater by the influence of his inspiring genius, than by his writings. The progress is marked, in two diverging directions, by Frederick Maurice and by Thomas Carlyle.

The system of thought of the former of these writers, as laid down principally in his "Kingdom of Christ," his History of ethic philosophy, and his Lectures on the religions of the world, may, with reference to the present inquiry, be said to have its centre in the following ideas. He believes the conscience of men at the present day to be at war with the popular theology, and this theology, among Romanists as well as Protestants, in England as well as on the Continent, to be ineffectual, because it contemplates humanity, not as created and constituted in Christ, but as a fallen evil state, out of which Christ came to redeem a certain number of those who believe in Him. This theology he holds not to be that of the Bible, or of the Church, as represented in the creeds of Christendom. The Bible represents Man as formed in the image of God; the Fall as the rebellious effort of the individual man to deny that glory for himself, i. e. to deny his human condition. This denial, be

ginning with the first man, is continued in all his descendants, the flesh of each struggling against that law of kind under which God has placed it. The Bible is an orderly history of God's education of a particular race to understand the divine constitution of humanity, and the possibility of a man, by faith, living according to it. This education does not contradict the pagan records, but explains them, and shows how the living Word was in all places and in all times the light of man. Christ, not Adam, represents humanity. Christ's redemption is the revelation of humanity in its true state and glory. The faith of a man is in the privilege which God has conferred on his race. Since the appearance of Christ, the kingdom of God is come and coming: we live in it. The incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the gift of the Spirit, the formation of Churches, were the preparation for a judgment upon the old world—a judgment answering strictly to the anticipations of it in the apostolical epistles. Then began the New Dispensation or kingdom of God, based upon the full revelation of His name, the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost- a kingdom for men as Men. The baptized Church is the witness of this kingdom. God has educated the nations by it, precisely in the same sense and under the same limitations as he educated the nations in the old world by the Jews. The Old Testament remains to us an explanation of the conditions of national life, which is just as precious and necessary in the New Dispensation as in the Old. The New Testament explains the full law and glory of humanity. If a nation cannot fulfil the idea of the Old Testament, by acknowledging a righteous, invisible king over it, it will sink into a godless absolutism. If humanity does not acknowledge its constitution in Christ, it will sink into godless democracy.

As Maurice may be called the Semitic exponent of the deepest elements of English thought and life in this department, Carlyle, as a philosopher on history, or rather as manifesting in his