g better than conjecture was attainable.

But as soon as we are told that the evil in these human 'automata' being
a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, is
yet infinitely detestable to God; that the creatures who suffer under
the accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's
eyes, for doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be
justly punished in everlasting fire; we recoil against the paradox.

No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this
belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular
creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his
system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of
Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep
and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured for himself a mere
admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be
consistent, even at the price of the world's reprobation, and refused to
purchase the applause of his own age at the sacrifice of sincerity.

[P] _Refutation Inedite de Spinoza._ Par Leibnitz. _Precedee d'une
Memoire_, par Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1854.

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES.[Q]

To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult--it
is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a
glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own,
before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it.

And in historical enquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a
limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most,
approach least to agreement. The most careful investigations are
diverging roads--the further men travel upon them, the greater the
interval by which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the
history of the Saxon Princes is 'the scuffling of kites and crows.'
Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by
pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained
in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm
yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! Through what common
term can the student pass from one into the other?

Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The history of England
scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of the seventeenth
century. To Lord John Russell, the Refo