of philosophic thought, for this reason, that it inclines the reader to suspend his convictions upon some fated progress of events which will of itself do the world's thinking for it, and turn both heart and mind at last into cheerful, complacent pensioners of science.
The object of Mr. Lecky is to trace the history of the spirit of Rationalism,—the spirit which disposes men to reject all belief founded upon authority, and to make the causes of phenomena intrinsic and not extrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Rationalism, if we rightly apprehend Mr. Lecky, is not any precise doctrine or system of doctrine, but only a diffused bias or tendency of the mind to regard the power which is operative in Nature and history as a rigidly creative or constitutive power, rather than a redemptive or formative one. Doubtless Mr. Lecky, if he should ever consider the subject, would be free to admit that the creative action implies a necessary reaction on the part of the creature. But he has manifestly no sympathy with the early or imaginative faiths of the world, which represent creation as a physical rather than a rational exhibition of the Divine power. His entire book is written in the service of the opposite conception. To be sure, he does not discuss the new faith as a theologian, but only as an historian. It is not an affair of the heart with him, but only of the head. He takes no pains to commend it as an advance in point of truth upon the old faith, and does not once even avow his own intellectual identification with it. In short, he is not the retained attorney of the new faith, but its disinterested annalist, treating it simply as an historic change wrought in the texture of men's thought, promoted by such and such causes, attested by such and such effects, but independent of all partisan judgment and clamor either favorable or adverse. Still there is no doubt of the historian's own private bias. He applauds ex animo the change he records; and his book would have gained greatly in interest, if he could only have written it a little more from the heart and a little less from the head. For then, apart from the incidental advantage which would accrue to it, to the reader's imagination, as being a revelation of the author's living personality, we think the author himself could hardly fail to have seen, before he had finished his task, that there is no essential contradiction between the world's earlier and later faiths; that these faiths differ not as good and evil or true and false differ, but only and at most as root and stem and flower differ in the plant, or birth, growth, and maturity in the animal.
The lesson which Mr. Lecky inculcates upon his reader is this: that civilization and miracle are fatally opposed; that the former waxes or wanes precisely as the latter is discredited or accredited. History shows civilization to have thriven precisely as men have outgrown their belief in miracle, or the possibility of any outward Divine intervention in Nature, and have learned to insist upon strictly natural causes for all natural effects. The fruits of Mr. Lecky's research on this subject are varied and interesting, and we cordially commend his volumes to the reader as an inviting storehouse of materials for reflection; but we very much doubt whether the school of thought he represents has, on the whole, mastered the problem of civilization any more thoroughly than its rival. The difference between the two schools is, indeed, one of principle more than of words; but we cannot help thinking, nevertheless, that the controversy is needlessly protracted on both sides, for want of a sufficiently definite and comprehensive statement of the point in dispute. Let us see whether we cannot make at least an approximation to such a statement.
What is agitated, then, between the two rival schools of thought is the Divine power: not the existence of such power, for there is no noticeable difference on that point, but only its quality or mode of operation. The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; but as that mode of action was exhausted by its own universality, His subsequent relation to His creatures must be purely administrative, as expressing His personal pleasure or displeasure in their various functioning. The other side do not dogmatize about the Divine power, or its method of action, in the abstract. They only insist, as against their antagonists, that the Divine administration of Nature is not, within the
