made it superstitious; and loyalty and
superstition early formed an alliance by which all independent energy
of conduct and thought was suppressed. According to Mr. Buckle, the
prosperity of nations, in modern times, "depends on principles to which
the clergy, as a body, are invariably opposed." This proposition is, to
him, true of Protestant as well as Catholic clergymen; and a nation
like Spain, looking to the Government for what it should do, and to the
Church for what it should believe, has necessarily become inefficient
and ignorant.

Spain has few friends among English readers, and Mr. Buckle's
contemptuous opinion of its civilization may not, therefore, rouse
much opposition that he will be compelled to heed. But it is not so in
respect to Scotland, a caustic survey of whose civilization occupies
three-quarters of the present volume. The position is taken, that
Scotland, of all the countries of Protestant Europe, has been and is
the most superstitious and priest-ridden. The only thing that saved the
people from the fate of Spain was the fact, that their insubordination
to temporal authority was as marked as their slavery to spiritual
authority. They had the good fortune to be rebels as well as fanatics;
but the reforming clergy having, after 1580, allied themselves heartily
with the people against the king and nobles, increased as patriots
the influence they exerted as priests. The love of country being thus
associated with love of the Church, the people were enslaved by the very
religious leaders who aided them in the fight against those forms of
arbitrary power they mutually detested. The tyranny of the Presbyterian
minister was lovingly accepted by the same population by which the
tyranny of bishop and king was abhorred.

Mr. Buckle, with the malicious delight which only a philosopher in
search of facts to fit his theory can know, has delved in a stratum of
theological literature now covered from the common eye by more important
deposits, in order to prove that in the seventeenth century the people
of Scotland were ruled by a set of petty theological tyrants, as
ignorant and as inhuman as ever disgraced a civilized society, and that
their ignorance and inhumanity were all the more influential from being
called by the name and acting by the authority of religion.

The author then proceeds to consider the philosophical and scientific
reaction against this ecclesiastical despotism, which occurred in the
eight