.. Noble conceptions already existing, and a noble school of
execution which will launch mind and hand upon their true courses, are
indispensable to transcendent excellence. Shakspeare's plays were as
much the offspring of the long generations who had pioneered the road
for him, as the discoveries of Newton were the offspring of those of
Copernicus."[8] The principles here enounced apply with equal force to
philosophers and men of science. The philosophy of Plato was but the
ripened fruit of the pregnant thoughts and seminal utterances of his
predecessors,--Socrates, Anaxagoras, and Pythagoras; whilst all of them
do but represent the general tendency and spirit of their country and
their times. The principles of Lord Bacon's "Instauratio Magna" were
incipient in the "Opus Majus" of Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar. The
sixteenth century matured the thought of the thirteenth century. The
inductive method in scientific inquiry was immanent in the British mind,
and the latter Bacon only gave to it a permanent form. It is true that
great men have occasionally appeared on the stage of history who, like
the reformers Luther and Wesley, have seemed to be in conflict with the
prevailing spirit of their age and nation, but these men were the
creations of a providence--that providence which, from time to time, has
_supernaturally_ interposed in the moral history of our race by
corrective and remedial measures. These men were inspired and led by a
spirit which descended from on high. And yet even they had their
precursors and harbingers. Wyckliffe and John Huss, and Jerome of Prague
are but the representatives of numbers whose names do not grace the
historic page, who pioneered the way for Luther and the Reformation. And
no one can read the history of that great movement of the sixteenth
century without being persuaded there were thousands of Luther's
predecessors and contemporaries who, like Staupitz and Erasmus, lamented
the corruptions of the Church of Rome, and only needed the heroic
courage of Luther to make them reformers also. Whilst, therefore, we
recognize a free causal power in man, by which he determines his
individual and responsible character, we are compelled to recognize the
general law, that national character is mainly the result of those
geographical and ethological, and political and religious conditions in
which the nations have been placed in the providence of God.

[Footnote 7: See Dr. Wheedon's "Freedom of t