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and strengthen his judgment; he may acquire the faculty and the habit of discerning quicker and looking farther; and of exerting that flexibility and steadiness which are necessary to be joined in the conduct of all affairs that depend on the concurrence or opposition of other men.-BOLINGBROKE.1

GOD IN HISTORY.

History cannot, in our day, be that lifeless series of events which the greater part of previous historians deemed it sufficient to enumerate. It is now understood that in history as in man are two elements, matter and spirit. Our great historians, unable to satisfy themselves with a 'detail of facts, constituting only a barren chronicle, have sought for a principle of life to animate the materials of past ages.

Some have borrowed this principle from art, aiming at vivid, faithful, and graphic description, and endeavouring to make their narrative live with the life of the events themselves.

Others have applied to philosophy for the spirit which should give fruit to their labours. To facts they have united speculative views, instructive lessons, political and philosophical truths, enlivening their narrative by the language which they have made it speak, and the ideas which it has enabled them to suggest. Both methods doubtless are good, and should be employed within certain limits; but there is another source to which, above all others, it is necessary to apply for the spirit and life of the past-I mean Religion. History should be made to live with its own proper life. God is this life. must be acknowledged-God proclaimed-in history. The history of the world should purport to be annals of the government of the Supreme King.

God

In all the movements of nations there is a living principle which emanates from God. God is present on the vast stage on which the generations of men successively appear. True, He is there a God invisible; but if the profane multitude

1 Henry St. John Lord Bolingbroke, the leader, in conjunction with Harley Earl of Oxford, of the Tory party of Queen Anne's reign, was forced to take refuge in exile from the vengeance of the Whigs on the accession of George I, to the British crown. His rare accomplishments and elegant taste were disfigured with scepticism; his writings are dangerous, therefore, in their principles, but their style exhibits a model of simplicity and dignity. Our extracts are from his "Letters on the Study and Use of History."

pass carelessly by, because He is concealed, profound intellects, spirits which feel a longing for the principle of their existence, seek Him with so much the more earnestness, and are not satisfied until they are prostrated before Him. And their inquiries are magnificently rewarded; for, from the heights which they must reach in order to meet with God, the history of the world, instead of exhibiting to them, as to the ignorant crowd, a confused chaos, is seen like a majestic temple, on which the invisible hand of God himself is at work, and which, from humanity, as the rock on which it is founded, is rising up to His glory.

Shall we not see God in those great phenomena, those great personages, those great states, which rise, and suddenly, so to speak, spring from the dust of the earth, giving to human life a new impulse, form, and destiny? Shall not we see Him in those great heroes who start up in society at particular epochs, displaying an activity and a power beyond the ordinary limits of man, and around whom individuals and nations come without hesitation, and group themselves as around a higher and mysterious nature? Who flung forward into space those comets of gigantic form and fiery hair, which appear only at long intervals, shedding on the superstitious herd of mortals either plenty and gladness, or pestilence and terror? Who, if not God? . . . Alexander seeks his origin in the abodes of Divinity; and in the most irreligious age there is no great renown which strives not to connect itself in some way with heaven.

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And do not those revolutions, which cast down dynasties, or even whole kingdoms into the dust-those huge wrecks which we fall in with in the midst of the sands—those majestic ruins which the field of humanity presents, do not these cry loud enough, GOD IN HISTORY? Gibbon, sitting amid the wrecks of the Capitol, and contemplating the venerable ruins, acknowledges the intervention of a higher power. He sees, he feels it, and in vain would turn away from it. This spectre of a mysterious power reappears behind each ruin, and he conceives the idea of describing its influence in the history of the disorganization, the decline and fall of this Roman power, which had subjugated the nations. This mighty hand, which a man of distinguished genius-one, however, who had not bent the knee before Jesus Christperceives athwart scattered fragments of the tomb of Romulus, reliefs of Marcus Aurelius, busts of Cicero and Virgil,

statues of Cæsar and Augustus, trophies of Trajan, and steeds of Pompey, shall not we discover amid all ruins, and recognise as the hand of our God?

Strange! this interposition of God in human affairs, which even Pagans had recognised, men reared amid the grand ideas of Christianity treat as superstition.

The name which Grecian antiquity gave to the Sovereign God, shews us that it had received primitive revelations of this great truth of a God, the source of history, and of the life of nations. It called him Zeus-that is to say, He who gives life to all that lives, to individuals and nations. To his altars kings and subjects come to take their oaths, and from his mysterious inspirations Minos and other legislators pretend to have received their laws. Nay more, this great truth is figured by one of the most beautiful myths of Pagan antiquity. Even Mythology might teach the sages of our day. This is a fact which it may be worth while to establish; perhaps there are individuals who will oppose fewer prejudices to the lessons of Paganism than to those of Christianity. This Zeus, then, this Sovereign God, this Eternal Spirit, the principle of life, is father of Clio, the Muse of History, whose mother is Mnemosyne or Memory. Thus, according to antiquity, history unites a celestial to a terrestrial nature. is daughter of God and man. But, alas! the short-sighted wisdom of our boasted days is far below those heights of Pagan wisdom. History has been robbed of her divine parent, and now an illegitimate child, a bold adventurer, she roams the world, not well knowing whence she comes, or whither she goes.

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But this divinity of Pagan antiquity is only a dim reflection, a flickering shadow of the Eternal Jehovah. The true God whom the Hebrews worship sees meet to imprint it on the minds of all nations that he reigns perpetually on the earth, and for this purpose gives, if I may so express it, a bodily form to this reign in the midst of Israel. A visible theocracy behoved for once to exist on the earth, that it might incessantly recall the invisible theocracy which will govern the world for ever.

And what lustre does not the great truth-God in History -receive from the Christian dispensation? Who is Jesus Christ, if He be not God in History? It was the discovery of Jesus Christ that gave John Müller, the prince of modern historians, his knowledge of history. "The Gospel," he says,

"is the fulfilment of all hopes, the finishing point of all philosophy, the explanation of all revolutions, the key to all the apparent contradictions of the physical and moral world; in short, life and immortality. Ever since I knew the Saviour, I see all things clearly; with Him there is no difficulty which I cannot solve."

So speaks this great historian; and, in truth, is not the fact of God's appearance in human nature the key-stone of the arch, the mysterious knot which binds up all the things of earth, and attaches them to heaven? There is a birth of God in the history of the world, and shall God not be in history? Jesus Christ is the true God in the history of men. The very meanness of his appearance proves it. When man wishes to erect a shade or shelter on the earth, you may expect preparations, materials, scaffolding, workmen, tools, trenches, rubbish. But God, when He is pleased to do it, takes the smallest seed, which a new-born babe could have clasped in its feeble hand, deposits it in the bosom of the earth, and from this grain, at first imperceptible, produces the immense tree under which the families of the earth recline. To do great things by imperceptible means is the law of God.

In Jesus Christ this law receives its most magnificent fulfilment. Of Christianity, which has now taken possession of the portals of nations-which is, at this moment, reigning or wandering over all the tribes of the earth from the rising to the setting sun, and which incredulous philosophy herself is obliged to acknowledge as the spiritual and social law of the world-of this Christianity, (the greatest thing under the vault of heaven-nay, in the boundless immensity of creation,) what was the commencement? An infant born in the smallest town of the most despised nation of the earth-an infant whose mother had not what the poorest and most wretched female in any one of our cities has, a room for birth-an infant born in a stable, and laid in a manger! There, O God, I behold and I adore Thee!

DR. MERLE D'AUBIGNE.1

OBJECTS AND SOURCES OF HISTORY.

Political history has for its object to describe the fate of

1 Our extract is taken from the Preface to the author's celebrated History of the Reformation,

states, considered in respect to their relations, both internal and external. In respect to internal relations and circumstances, one of its main branches is the history of governments : in respect to external relations and circumstances, it comprises not only the history of wars, but likewise that of the connexions of peaceful intercourse which have existed between different states.

General political history is usually distinguished into three parts: ancient, middle, and modern. The first extends to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, that is to say, to about the end of the fifth century of the Christian era; the second extends to the discovery of America, and of a passage by sea to the East Indies, that is to say, to the end of the fifteenth century; the third extends from the commencement of the sixteenth century to our own day.

From the definition just given, it follows, that political history commences at that point in the range of time where states first make their appearance. Whatever is known,

therefore, of the previous times in which our race existed; whatever concerning that period is gathered from the traditions of individual men or tribes, in respect to their migrations, their affinities, their inventions, belongs not to political history, but must be referred to the general history of nations.

The sources of history may be generally ranged under two heads; oral traditions, and written documents of all kinds. The history of every nation usually commences in oral tradition; and that remains the only source, so long as the art of writing is either unknown, or but little practised, among the people.

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Under the name of traditional history or mythology, is comprehended the whole collection of oral traditions existing in any country such a traditional history or mythology we consequently meet with in every nation, at the earliest stage of its existence. This mythology, however, by no means consists solely in distinct historic documents; it embraces every branch of information and knowledge which, to a nation in its first infancy, appear of such importance, as to be worthy of being preserved and handed down to posterity. The place of writing is, among such nations, generally supplied, in some measure, by poetry; which being in its origin nothing more than imagery expressed in figurative language, must spontaneously arise among men, as yet wont

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