one's life and fortunes to it, is scarcely the part of a wise
man. Mr. Lecky's essay would seem to have originated more in a desire to
try his hand at theorizing than in any necessity to ventilate some
previous _drifts_ from the beginning to the end of his book. You never
feel yourself in a compact, water-tight boat, obedient to rudder and
sail, but at most on a raft, drifting at the absolute _gre_ of the
tides, in a certain _general_ direction, no doubt, but with no foresight
of the specific intellectual port at which you are to bring up.
Occasionally the mist condenses, the rain patters down, you catch a
glimpse of far-off mountaintops, and suppose the entire landscape will
soon be bathed in sunshine. But no, a new inrush of illustrative facts
takes place, and all is fog again. There is a great deal of good writing
in the book, and it leaves nothing to be desired in the way of advanced
_sentiment_. But we fail to perceive its bearing upon the progress of
ideas. It may flatter a superficial scientific optimism, but it will
obstruct rather than promote the interests of philosophic thought, for
this reason, that it inclines the reader to suspend his convictions upon
some fated _progress of events_ which will of itself do the world's
thinking for it, and turn both heart and mind at last into cheerful,
complacent pensioners of science.

The object of Mr. Lecky is to trace the history of _the spirit_ of
Rationalism,--the spirit which disposes men to reject all belief founded
upon authority, and to make the causes of phenomena intrinsic and not
extrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Rationalism, if we rightly
apprehend Mr. Lecky, is not any precise doctrine or system of doctrine,
but only a diffused bias or tendency of the mind to regard the power
which is operative in Nature and history as a rigidly creative or
constitutive power, rather than a redemptive or formative one. Doubtless
Mr. Lecky, if he should ever consider the subject, would be free to
admit that the creative action implies a necessary reaction on the part
of the creature. But he has manifestly no sympathy with the early or
imaginative faiths of the world, which represent creation as a physical
rather than a rational exhibition of the Divine power. His entire book
is written in the service of the opposite conception. To be sure, he
does not discuss the new faith as a theologian, but only as an
historian. It is not an affair of the heart with him, but only of t