eason,
and prejudges all matters by the application of fixed principles.

It is no use that M. Coquerel flatters himself that he has set the
matter at rest. He flatters himself in vain; he ought to know his
Catholic countrymen better:--

We have little doubt that as long as the Catholic religion shall
last their little manuals of falsified history will continue to
repeat that Jean Calas murdered his son because he had become a
convert to the Catholic faith.

Are little manuals of falsified history confined only to one set
of people? Is not John Foxe still proof against the assaults of
Dr. Maitland? The habit of _a priori_ judgments as to historical
facts is, as Mr. Pattison truly says, "fatal to truth and
integrity." It is most mischievous when it assumes a philosophic
gravity and warps the criticism of a distinguished scholar.

This fixed habit of mind is the more provoking because, putting aside
the obtrusive and impertinent injustice to which it leads, Mr.
Pattison's critical work is of so high a character. His extensive and
accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his
reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which
seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high. Perhaps he
believes too much in books and learning, in the power which they exert,
and what they can do to enable men to reach the higher conquests of
moral and religious truth--perhaps he forgets, in the amplitude of his
literary resources, that behind the records of thought and feeling
there are the living mind and thought themselves, still clothed with
their own proper force and energy, and working in defiance of our
attempts to classify, to judge, or to explain: that there are the real
needs, the real destinies of mankind, and the questions on which they
depend--of which books are a measure indeed, but an imperfect one. As
an instance, we might cite his "Essay on the Theology of
Germany"--elaborate, learned, extravagant in its praise and in its
scorn, full of the satisfaction of a man in possession of a startling
and little known subject, but with the contradictions of a man who in
spite of his theories believes more than his theories. But, as a
student who deals with books and what books can teach, it is a pleasure
to follow him; his work is never slovenly or superficial; the reader
feels that he is in the hands of a man who thoroughly knows what h