ively glide by, but he who is placed on an exalted station
views, at a glance, the whole as a motionless silvery thread among the
fields. To the one there is the accumulating experience and knowledge of
man in time, to the other there is the instantaneous the unsuccessive
knowledge of God.

[Sidenote: Changeability of forms and unchangeability of law.]

Is there an object presented to us which does not bear the mark of
ephemeral duration? As respects the tribes of life, they are scarcely
worth a moment's thought, for the term of the great majority of them is
so brief that we may say they are born and die before our eyes. If we
examine them, not as individuals, but as races, the same conclusion
holds good, only the scale is enlarged from a few days to a few
centuries. If from living we turn to lifeless nature, we encounter again
the evidence of brief continuance. The sea is unceasingly remoulding its
shores; hard as they are, the mountains are constantly yielding to frost
and to rain; here an extensive tract of country is elevated, there
depressed. We fail to find any thing that is not undergoing change.

Then forms are in their nature transitory, law is everlasting. If from
visible forms we turn to directing law how vast is the difference. We
pass from the finite, the momentary, the incidental, the conditioned--to
the illimitable, the eternal, the necessary, the unshackled.

[Sidenote: The object of this book is to assert the control of law in
human affairs.]

It is of law that I am to speak in this book. In a world composed of
vanishing forms I am to vindicate the imperishability, the majesty of
law, and to show how man proceeds, in his social march, in obedience to
it. I am to lead my reader, perhaps in a reluctant path, from the
outward phantasmagorial illusions which surround us, and so
ostentatiously obtrude themselves on our attention, to something that
lies in silence and strength behind. I am to draw his thoughts from the
tangible to the invisible, from the limited to the universal, from the
changeable to the invariable, from the transitory to the eternal; from
the expedients and volitions so largely amusing the life of man, to the
predestined and resistless issuing from the fiat of God.

Chapter II.

OF EUROPE: ITS TOPOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY.

ITS PRIMITIVE MODES OF THOUGHT, AND THEIR PROGRESSIVE VARIATIONS,
MANIFESTED IN THE GREEK AGE OF CREDULITY.

_Description of Europe: its Topography, Me