many enigmas as we please. To reduce the teaching of revelation to the progressive elucidation of a riddle, is to confound natural science and revelation. The distinction of their teaching is not that one instructs by things, the other by words,-for revealed tradition may be perpetuated in symbols and ceremonies, but that, whereas the lesson of nature is obscure, dubious, capable of various interpretations, suggestive of questions that it either cannot answer or cannot with the answer afford any criterion of its truth, the lesson of revelation clears the obscurity, answers the doubt, fixes the sense, and provides the criterion. If this is denied, it will be difficult to distinguish between revelation and nature; revelation will come to be considered a phase of nature, a natural and instinctive utterance of the understanding.

When revealed truth is made to depend upon and vary with the interpretation of Scripture, and when criticism is continually modifying this interpretation, it soon comes to be understood that revelation is a rough ore, which needs to be smelted and refined, that man may render it clearer, improve it, and alter it. But if man can mend it, the original can hardly have been of more than human contrivance. "If Christianity," says Mr. George Combe," was freed from many errors by the revival and spread of mere scholastic learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, much more may we expect that the interpretations of Scripture will be purified, corrected, and elucidated by the flood of light which the modern sciences will one day shed upon religion." What our forefathers could reform 300 years ago, we and our children may reform again and again. "What thought can think, another thought can mend." Religion, considered as a subject for mending and patching, must always be open to reconsideration and doubt. Though the original datum, whether a revealed or a natural enigma, is not the pure issue of the brain, yet the whole interpretation is so; and in this religion consists, just as science is the deduced law, not the natural fact. Religion, then (according to this theory), is investigation; but wherever investigation is a duty, doubt is a duty. But to acknowledge a proposition to be revealed by God, and then to doubt of its truth, is impossible: thus a new definition of revelation is found needful--it must be derived from man, not from God. Both revelation and science must be supposed to be equally human: revelation must be the happy guess of a mind guided by its fellow-feeling with nature; science, the generalisation of the results of our observation of nature. One is hypothesis, the other experiment. Revelation is the prophetic dream of what should be; science

is the demonstration of what is. Revelation is the vague, terror-stricken feeling of the force of nature; science is the clear picture of the Cosmos. Man's hopes and fears helped him to the revelation of the spiritual world; science purifies his view, and gives a natural explanation of what appeared above nature. "Revelation," says Miss Martineau, "only anticipates man's knowledge, and therefore when the knowledge is arrived at in natural course the revelation expires; it is an instrument of temporary use, and falls to pieces when done with." Science examines the vague presentiments of revelation, and verifies or explodes them. Thus revealed religion becomes a "branch of philosophy," the philosophy of the hypothetical, with Mr. Combe; or a poetical reverie, with Mr. F. Newman," created by the inward instincts of the soul, and afterwards pruned and chastened by the sceptical understanding;" or, with Raymond Lully, a blind groping in the dark, soon to be superseded by the daylight of science. "Faith is the instrument of cognition for the rude and unlettered, reason for the educated and subtle mind; faith is blind and blundering, like the touch; reason nimble and sure, like the sight." Thus does the theory that revelation is a divine enigma gradually solved by reason, soon lead to the conclusion that it is not divine at all.

"Still," it may be said, "is there not a progress in Scriptural criticism? Are not several interpretations, formerly received, now exploded? Is there not a perpetual variation in the opinions of Christians about history, science, and philosophy, and a perpetual application of Scriptural language to each new view ?" This is true. But in the midst of all these inconstancies there may be, and there is, a constant element, a nucleus of unvarying dogma, which is the essence of the revelation and the true object of faith. The variations, at most, only affect the proofs and illustrations of these dogmas, not their substance. Without this invariable element revelation would be destroyed, or confounded with the variable element which each man may interpret as he sees good. The supposition that all religion may be reformed, that man may discuss on their own merits doctrines which he can only know by revelation, and that the progress of religious illumination grows out of the advance of science, confounds revelation with nature, and makes it only an impression or symbol of God's attributes, left to man to interpret as he can. If nature and revelation are to be contrasted, we must own that the truths revealed are really revealedare told plainly, and may be known infallibly. To maintain that they were imperfectly understood in former times, is to

imply that revelation was a deceitful oracle, pretending to answer a question that it really left unanswered; it is to affirm that God propounded to our fathers a riddle which He left for us to solve. But is a riddle a revelation?

Kant has proved from a criticism of the reason itself, and the history of philosophy proves experimentally, that reason alone can give no secure answer to the great questions of the soul. Natural science does not pretend to answer them: it catalogues facts, makes statistical tables, and generalises the results, but at last has no more than a classified index to the book of nature, and an inventory of sensations. Not a step has been made towards a knowledge of the origin, essence, and destination of the world and man. "No power of genius," says Emerson, "has yet had the smallest effect in explaining existence; the perfect enigma remains." "The human mind," says George Combe, "is incapable of penetrating to a knowledge of the substance or essence of any being or thing in the universe; all that it can discover are qualities and modes of action." But our minds are so constituted as to be continually and urgently asking for more than this-"What am I? what is the world? who made me, and why?" Science has no answer, and owns her ignorance. But scientific men often couple with the confession of their impotence the assertion that these questions are absolutely unanswerable, that phenomena are the only realities, and that whoever professes to have learnt about substance is either a fool or knave. But is it conceivable that man must ask questions to which there cannot be an answer? If a man comes forward to answer them; if his answer is found by those who receive it wonderfully adapted to the wants of the soul, opening like a key the most intricate wards; if moreover the man says, "This is no happy guess of mine-it was revealed to me, no matter how; but in proof of the fact of revelation I am commissioned to give these signs;" if upon this he heals diseases by a word, raises the dead from the tomb, stills the winds and waves, predicts future events which duly come to pass, then is not the mind forced in spite of itself to believe? Under these circumstances, is it not an absurd puzzle to say that though the mind can ask the questions, it cannot receive the answer?

And to this answer Science can have nothing to object. She has already put herself out of court by confessing that she neither knows the essence of things, nor can discover it; she cannot, then, object to what revelation tells us about this If the answer had come from the mind that asked the question, Science might criticise the powers of the mind;

essence.

VOL. V. NEW SERIES.

but when the answer comes from one who proves by signs that he is in communication with the supernatural world, Science has only to examine his credentials; to object in limine that the communication is impossible is to beg the question. All her real rights are comprised in this office-to examine whether the credentials or signs are true, and whether in the articles proposed to our faith, or in the modes by which they are made known and recommended to us, there is any thing contradictory to the principles of the understanding, or the demonstrated truths of science.

We have no space left to consider the relations between the faith in its fourth sense of the dogmas of religion, and science considered as the whole body of known natural truth. The subject is a vast one, and well deserves an attentive analysis.

EXPECTATION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THERE is nothing which so favourably distinguishes modern from ancient historians as the importance which they allow to the immaterial metaphysical agents in human affairs, and their attempts to trace the progress of ideas, as well as the succession of events, and the reaction of one upon the other. Among those ideas which are at once causes and effects, which influence one series of events by reflecting another, the most important, but the most difficult to estimate, are the ideas which a nation entertains of its history. In its interpretation of its own experience it forms and expresses its notion of its own character and destiny, of its appointed part in the world and in the designs of God, and the lessons, the warnings, and the tendencies, by which it consents to be guided. These notions become a part as well as a result of its nature and of its history, and irresistibly direct its conduct. It is not, therefore, without reason that a living historian has reproduced in its legendary and poetic garb the story of early Rome, not so much in opposition to the conclusions of modern criticism, but because, in order to understand a people's history, we must know its own idea of it, and must give a just weight to fables, not as truths, but as forces. So much truth there is in the saying that a people would be in the power of the man who should have the making of its ballads.

The present derives its explanation from the past, as the past becomes intelligible from the present; causes must be

causes.

examined in their effects, and effects understood in their Neither is intelligible when considered alone. "What is the present but the shadow cast, Part by the future, partly by the past?"

There is a prophetic office in history, and our notions of the future are shaped according to our experience of the past. A people that has a consistent view of its career and of its position inevitably forms, in harmony with this view, some idea of the things that are to come. It discerns its ideal in the direction it has previously pursued, and its memories justify its anticipation. All these are part of the influences that form its character and spirit, and deeply modify its bearing. The past acts upon our conduct chiefly by the views of the future which it suggests, and the expectations it creates. It influences the present through the future. In their own glorious or mournful recollections nations found the hopes, the aspirations, and the fears which guide their course. Not because men act in unconscious conformity with their expectations, and bend their conduct according to their notions of fate, but forasmuch as history is not a result of human design, because there is something deeper than interest or conjecture in popular instinct, because patience and longanimity are attributes of the Providence which leads by long but sure preparation to great results, and conducts innumerable streams by the same current to the same goal, because intelligible warnings precede great catastrophes, and nations read as it were in their consciences the signs of the times; therefore there is a teaching in history which is equivalent to prophecy, and in which the historian recognises both a power and a token.

Yet this is an element of their science which modern historians have altogether neglected. Many of the chapters of the famous history of human error have been written, and the imponderables and curiosities of history have been specially cultivated; but none have cared to trace the influence of prophecy on events, or rather of events on prophecy, and the reality of ideas of this kind has not been admitted. We have had writers who delight in portents and prodigies, and writers who believe in nothing but fixed laws; but none have adopted into their inquiry the influence of that sort of prescience and prediction which ought to have been attractive to both, because it is a great instance of divine mercy, and at the same time the highest effort of human wisdom. Marvel-mongers have discouraged sober men from inquiring for reasonable instances of a faculty which degenerates easily into the marvellous, and prophecies have been