after us. What opinions, what convictions,
the infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it
live out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold
man would undertake to conjecture. "The time will come," said
Lichtenberg, in scorn at the materializing tendencies of modern
thought,--"the time will come when the belief in God will be as the
tales with which old women frighten children; when the world will be a
machine, the ether a gas, and God will be a force." Mankind, if they
last long enough on the earth, may develop strange things out of
themselves; and the growth of what is called the Positive Philosophy
is a curious commentary on Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end
be seventy years hence, or seven hundred,--be the close of the mortal
history of humanity as far distant in the future as its shadowy
beginnings seem now to lie behind us,--this only we may foretell with
confidence,--that the riddle of man's nature will remain unsolved.
There will be that in him yet which physical laws will fail to
explain,--that something, whatever it be, in himself and in the world,
which science can not fathom, and which suggests the unknown
possibilities of his origin and his destiny.

II

THE CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII[35]

Protestants and Catholics united to condemn a government under which
both had suffered; and a point on which enemies were agreed was
assumed to be proved. When I commenced the examination of the records,
I brought with me the inherited impression, from which I had neither
any thought nor any expectation that I should be disabused. I found
that it melted between my hands, and with it disappeared that other
fact, so difficult to credit, yet as it had appeared so impossible to
deny, that English Parliaments, English judges, English clergy,
statesmen whose beneficent legislation survives among the most valued
of our institutions, prelates who were the founders and martyrs of the
English Church, were the cowardly accomplices of abominable
atrocities, and had disgraced themselves with a sycophancy which the
Roman senate imperfectly approached when it fawned on Nero.

[Footnote 35: From the "History of England."]

Henry had many faults. They have been exhibited in the progress of the
narrative: I need not return to them. But his position was one of
unexampled difficulty; and by the work which he accomplished, and the
conditions, internal and external, under which his t