bonds that hold them, they would give themselves other laws and other men to administer them. . . . . Suppose there were to arise in Europe a vigorous people, with genius, resources, and a government,-a people combining with austere virtues and a national militia a fixed plan of aggrandisement, which should not lose sight of that system, and knowing how to make war at little cost, and how to subsist by its victories, should not be compelled to lay down its arms by calculations of finance,-we should see it subjugate its neighbours, and overturn our feeble governments, as the north wind bends the reed. . . . France is now the country that is most rapidly declining. The government does not sustain it; and the vices which every where else are spread only by imitation are born there, are more inveterate, more destructive, and must destroy her first. The monstrous and complicated system of our laws, our finances, and our military power, will fall to pieces."*

No writer of that age seems to have possessed greater foresight, or to have formed his opinions on a larger induction than Linguet, a pamphleteer of great activity, but of no great authority while he lived. In the first volume of his Annales Politiques, published in the year 1777, he writes as follows: "It is a tendency common to all, from the princes to the lowest of their subjects, to consider success as a right, and to deem oneself innocent when one has not failed.† . . Unjust conquests had been seen before, but hitherto usurpers had been scrupulous to conceal their sword behind manifestoes.. But now it is in the lifetime of the owner, in the midst of peace, without a grievance, with a pretext even in appearance, the crown of Sarmatia has been shattered to pieces by the hands of friends. The weakness of the one, the power of the others, have been the only reasons invoked or recognised. The terrible principle that force is the best argument of kings, so often put in practice, but always so sedulously disguised, has been for the first time produced, and practised openly and without concealment. . . . . It cannot be but that something should filter imperceptibly from this into general habits.. .. Never perhaps, in the midst of an apparent prosperity, has Europe been so near a total subversion, the more terrible because despair will be its cause. We have arrived by a directly contrary road precisely to the point where Italy stood when the servile

Guibert, Essai général de Tactique, tom. i., Discours préliminaire, pp. ix. xiii. xix. xliv.

†The elder Mirabeau says, in the Ami des Hommes (iii. 33), “La loi des plus forts fait de la révolte le droit des gens."

war inundated her with blood, and carried carnage and conflagration to the gates of the mistress of the world."

In the importance which this able writer attributes to the partition of Poland he is supported by Burke, who called it "the very first great breach in the modern political system of Europe." It did more than any other event, except the suppression of the Jesuits, to obscure the political conscience of mankind, and to prepare men to despise the obligations of right, in obedience to the example set them by their kings. The consequences were inevitable, and they were foretold, and the Revolution was heralded and announced at each step of its approach by all the most competent observers. The feeling of its approaching end was strong in the old society, and both the party of those who were the authors of the great catastrophe, and of those who were to be its victims, agreed in those expectations which were the hopes of the first and the fears of the other. "Revolutions," says Bonald, "have immediate material causes which strike the least attentive eye. These are in reality only the occasions. The real causes, the deep and efficient causes, are moral causes, which 'small minds and corrupt men do not understand. . You think that a financial deficit was the cause of the Revolution seek deeper, and you will find a deficit in the very principles of the social order." One of the ablest of those who saw the Revolution mingles perhaps some vanity with much truth when he says: "I know nothing of importance that has happened in Church or State since I grew up which I did not foresee. God does not permit that men should allow a principle, and restrain that which flows naturally from it."

RELIGION AND CIVILISATION.t

THE problem of the connection of religion with civilisation is one that at the present day must occupy the attention of every student of social science. However he may wish to shirk the question, the movements of the day force it upon him; even Proudhon, a man who thinks all religions, positive or negative, equally bad, who opposes pantheism, or even atheism, so far as it is a dogma, almost as violently as he opposes Christianity, is carried away by the vortex of thought; and while he would avert his eyes from religion, and never allow its name to escape his lips; while he thinks pp. 76, 78, 80, 85.

+ History of Civilisation in England. By H. T. Buckle. Vol. II. Parker, Son, and Bourn. 1861.

that the only way to treat it is to affect and feel utterly ignorant of its existence, he cannot help writing about it and about it, as if it had a serpentine fascination for him. The man who would fain think religion to be nothing writes about nothing else than the relations of religion and society. For this is the problem of the age, and the most unwilling thinker is obliged to give it some attention.

There are three well-defined divisions of thought upon this subject the first maintains the necessary union of religion and civilisation, the other two deny it; but one of them does so in the interests of religion, the other in the interests, real or supposed, of civilisation. Each of these divisions contains many subdivisions; the first, though it is forced to admit those lukewarm persons who practically reduce religion to little more than a diffuse social benevolence, typified in a Supreme Being, is better represented by those enthusiastic religionists who consider Christianity to be the present as well as the future redemption of our race, and the great model and ideal towards which all social efforts are to be directed ; who consider religion to be the soul of civilisation, and each of its dogmas and laws to possess a civil as well as an ecclesiastical development, to which the social action of the Church necessarily gives birth. "Civilisation is inchoate religion, religion is perfected civilisation; civilisation is a transitory and mediate perfection, religion is the final and eternal perfection." This is their creed.

The difficulty of adjusting this idea to commonly received views of facts, the suspicion that is attached to the names of some of its supporters, and a wholesome dislike of the ill company in which they are found, have somewhat frightened well-meaning men, and prevented them from giving due weight to the truth which it expresses. The "world" for them has no possible relations, except those of hostility, with the Church. And in this group we find men of all grades, from the common run of pious and stupid Protestants, up to those great men who, in former days, traced the beginnings of civil government to the corruption of our nature, to merely human right, to the cursed race of Cain, to the usurpations of atheists, thieves, perjurers, and murderers, or finally to the devil. Between these extremes all degrees are to be found; amongst us one of the most common expressions of the idea is that which bids us look at the civil and social work of the Church only as an accidental growth that crops out on her surface, overshadowing her instead of illustrating her, and making her stand in her own light, by doing more than she need do, more than belongs to her. If she has created civili

sations, fostered sciences, and revived the arts, this we are told has been but an overflow of her gifts, not strictly included in her mission, and therefore not to be relied on as a pledge that she will ever bestow such gifts again, or that her future influence will not be quite contrary to that which she has exercised in the past.

To separate civilisation from religion in the interests of the latter, is only to prompt the advocates of civilisation to do the same in the interests of their favourite, and to justify their doing so. This school of thought emerges in the policy of the Revolution, and in the philosophy of positivism. In England Mr. Buckle is its most learned advocate, and he defines civilisation in a manner that is intended to shut out any acknowledgment of the additions which it might receive from moral forces. The moral condition of mankind he holds to be nearly stationary, and only to provide as it were the atmosphere in which the real work of civilisation is carried on; the flux and reflux of religious opinions he holds to neutralise each other in the long-run, and to eliminate all their effects from human society, when sufficiently long periods are considered. His civilisation, or progress, is confined to material improvements,-to those additions to the stock of human wealth and power over nature, which, with an unconscious perversion of St. Bernard's maxim, Non tibi sint curæ res ad nihilum redituræ, he thinks alone worth having, because they alone are "essentially cumulative," and do not cease to exist with the death of their discoverer or possessor, like the control of the statesman and the presence of the saint. The accumulations must be ponderable, tangible; they are new methods of discovery, like Bacon's philosophy or Newton's fluxions; powers of nature newly tamed and harnessed, like steam or electricity; newly-discovered territories, metals, mines, articles of use and commerce. In things like these Mr. Buckle makes civilisation exclusively to consist; for him the mental activity that has only mind for its object, and which does not react upon nature, and enlarge the material domain of our race, is as nugatory as the activity of a pig's tail, which, as the Chinese proverb says, is going all day, but has done nothing at night. After thus restricting the sense of civilisation, Mr. Buckle has no difficulty in establishing four leading propositions, which, according to his view, must be deemed the basis of its history.

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They are 1st. That the progress of mankind depends on the success with which the laws of phenomena are investigated, and on the extent to which a knowledge of those laws is diffused. 2d. That before such investigation can begin, a spirit of scepticism must arise,

which, at first aiding the investigation, is afterwards aided by it. 3d. That the discoveries thus made increase the influence of intellectual truths, and diminish relatively, not absolutely, the influence of moral truths; moral truths being more stationary than intellectual truths, and receiving fewer additions. 4th. That the great enemy of this movement, and therefore the great enemy of civilisation, is the protective spirit; by which I mean the notion that society cannot prosper, unless the affairs of life are watched over and protected at nearly every turn by the State and the Church; the State teaching men what they are to do, and the Church teaching them what they are to believe."

That is to say, in Mr. Buckle's view, the great enemy of civilisation is the principle of authority, which is fatal to physical science, and therefore to physical civilisation. And note that it is not only the vagaries and the despotic acts and errors of authority which he abjures, but the principle itself.

Here, then, are the three schools; one whose central principle is to maintain intact the harmony and union of all truths of every order, and thus to imitate the Divine example; for "in all cases where evil is not the fundamental principle, God excludes nothing, sacrifices nothing; not the most insignificant virtue to the most sublime, not the minutest truth to the greatest." Its endeavour is ever, in practice as in theory, to show religion to be not only compatible with, but to be the active and energetic supporter of, all that is useful, beautiful, reasonable, honourable, good, and true; in a word, with the most perfect civilisation.

Both the other schools make the exclusion and the sacrifice which the first refuses to make; one sacrifices all minor interests to the real or supposed interests of religion, the other sacrifices all religious considerations at the shrine of science and progress. One school is Tory, and strives to preserve its rights of primogeniture by throttling all its younger brothers, like the Grand Turk. The other is Radical, and strives to equalise all ranks by the destruction of all classes that have hitherto been privileged. It is only the school first described that takes the true conservative line,-that preserves principles by permitting variations in their application, that is faithful to the idea by acknowledging every one of its many-sided developments. Both the Radicals and Tories of the union between civilisation and religion are violent and coercive in their tactics; and as they are both in possession of many real truths in their different orders, each of which is sufficient to be the ground of practical conviction and of enthusiasm, no true peace seems possible between them until they compromise their differences by merging in the school