Scottish farmer, the other into
a peddler of notions, and the third into a fat and comfortable English
banker?

We quote from an article which appeared in _"Theological Quarterly"_
some twenty years ago:

"What process of evolution resulted in the lives and deeds of such men
as Alexander the Great, Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] Constantine the
Great, Luther, Napoleon I, and Bismarck? All these great makers of
history were what they were far less in consequence and by the
continuation of the course of previous events or developments, than
largely in spite of the past and in direct opposition to forces which
had worked together in shaping the condition of things with which they
had to deal. The Macedonian empire would never have sprung into being
but for an Alexander, in whose mind the chief facts for its realization
were united. The Rome which Julius Ceasar [tr. note: sic] left behind
him was not that which he had found, only carried forward to a new stage
of development, but the embodiment of ideas conceived in his mind, a
quantity which under God the greatest Roman had _made_ out of a quantity
which he had found. The distinctive features of the Constantinian empire
as compared with that of Diocletian, or of the tetrarchy of which he was
the head, were not evolved from earlier political principles, but stood
out in bold contrast and even in direct opposition to the very
fundamentals of antique statesmanship, and so new in politics that even
Constantine permitted them to slip away from his grasp long before the
sunset of his life had come. Luther was not a more fully developed Hus
or Savonarola, and the Reformation was not the more advanced stage or
completion of a movement inaugurated by the Humanists, but a work of God
the actuating spirit of which was as diametrically contrary to the
rationalistic spirit which animated Erasmus and, in a measure, Zwingli
and his abettors, as it was to anti-christian Rome,--which was in 1517
essentially what it had been in 1302, when Boniface VIII issued his bull
_Unam sanctum_ as a definition of the rights and powers of Popery.
Napoleon did not carry onward but broke away from the tumult of French
politics when he laid the greater part of western Europe at his feet,
and the battle of Austerlitz and the rule of the Hundred Days were no
more evolved from the French Revolution as by intrinsic necessity than
the burning of Moscow and the Russian snows which turned to naught the
campaign