by law.]

We may therefore be satisfied that, whatever may have been the
particular form of the events of which we have had occasion to speak,
their order of succession was a matter of destiny, and altogether beyond
the reach of any individual. We may condemn the Byzantine monarchs, or
applaud the Arabian khalifs--our blame and our praise must be set at
their proper value. Europe was passing from its Age of Inquiry to its
Age of Faith. In such a transition the predestined underlies the
voluntary. There are analogies between the life of a nation and that of
an individual, who, though he may be in one respect the maker of his own
fortunes for happiness or for misery, for good or for evil, though he
remains here or goes there, as his inclinations prompt, though he does
this or abstains from that as he chooses, is nevertheless held fast by
an inexorable fate--a fate which brought him into the world
involuntarily so far as he was concerned, which presses him forward
through a definite career, the stages of which are absolutely
invariable--infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, old age, with all their
characteristic actions and passions, and which removes him from the
scene at the appointed time, in most cases against his will. So also it
is with nations; the voluntary is only the outward semblance, covering,
but hardly hiding the predetermined. Over the events of life we may have
control, but none whatever over the law of its progress. There is a
geometry that applies to nations, an equation of their curve of advance.
That no mortal man can touch.

[Sidenote: Arabian science in its stage of sorcery.]

We have now to examine in what manner the glimmering lamp of knowledge
was sustained when it was all but ready to die out. By the Arabians it
was handed down to us. The grotesque forms of some of those who took
charge of it are not without interest. They exhibit a strange mixture of
the Neo-platonist, the Pantheist, the Mohammedan, the Christian. In such
untoward times, it was perhaps needful that the strongest passions of
men should be excited and science stimulated by inquiries for methods of
turning lead into gold, or of prolonging life indefinitely. We have now
to deal with the philosopher's stone, the elixir vitae, the powder of
projection, magical mirrors, perpetual lamps, the transmutation of
metals. In smoky caverns under ground, where the great work is
stealthily carried on, the alchemist and his familiar are busy with