bilant
certitude. He is able to conceive that providence may attain its end
without the condition of progress, that the divine scheme would not be
frustrated if the world, governed by omnipotent wisdom, became steadily
worse. Assuming progress as a fact, if not a law, there comes the
question wherein it consists, how it is measured, where is its goal. Not
religion, for the Middle Ages are an epoch of decline. Catholicism has
since lost so much ground as to nullify the theories of Bossuet; whilst
Protestantism never succeeded in France, either after the Reformation,
when it ought to have prevailed, nor after the Revolution, when it ought
not. The failure to establish the Protestant Church on the ruins of the
old _regime_, to which Quinet attributes the breakdown of the
Revolution, and which Napoleon regretted almost in the era of his
concordat, is explained by Mr. Flint on the ground that Protestants were
in a minority. But so they were in and after the wars of religion; and
it is not apparent why a philosopher who does not prefer orthodoxy to
liberty should complain that they achieved nothing better than
toleration. He disproves Bossuet's view by that process of deliverance
from the Church which is the note of recent centuries, and from which
there is no going back. On the future I will not enlarge, because I am
writing at present in the HISTORICAL, not the PROPHETICAL, REVIEW. But
some things were not so clear in France in 1679 as they are now at
Edinburgh. The predominance of Protestant power was not foreseen, except
by those who disputed whether Rome would perish in 1710 or about 1720.
The destined power of science to act upon religion had not been proved
by Newton or Simon. No man was able to forecast the future experience of
America, or to be sure that observations made under the reign of
authority would be confirmed by the reign of freedom.

If the end be not religion, is it morality, humanity, civilisation,
knowledge? In the German chapters of 1874 Dr. Flint was severe upon
Hegel, and refused his notion that the development of liberty is the
soul of history, as crude, one-sided, and misunderstood. He is more
lenient now, and affirms that liberty occupies the final summit, that it
profits by all the good that is in the world, and suffers by all the
evil, that it pervades strife and inspires endeavour, that it is almost,
if not altogether, the sign, and the prize, and the motive in the onward
and upward advance of