human race seems, all at once, to have awakened with renovated and giant strength, from his long sleep. In less than a century from the invention of printing, and the fall of the Eastern empire, Copernicus discovered the true theory of the planetary motions, and a very few years afterwards, was succeeded by the great precursors of Newton,-Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo.

The step made by Copernicus may be justly regarded as one of the proudest triumphs of human reason;-whether we consider the sagacity which enabled the author to obviate, to his own satisfaction, the many plausible objections which must have presented themselves against his conclusions, at a period when the theory of motion was so imperfectly understood; or the bold spirit of inquiry which encouraged him to exercise his private judgment, in opposition to the authority of Aristotle,-to the decrees of the church of Rome,—and to the universal belief of the learned, during a long succession of ages. He appears, indeed, to have well merited the encomium bestowed on him by Kepler, when he calls him "a man of vast genius, and, what is of still greater moment in these researches, a man of a free mind."

The establishment of the Copernican system, beside the new field of study which it opened to Astronomers, must have had great effects on philosophy in all its branches, by inspiring those sanguine prospects of future improvement, which stimulate curiosity and invigorate the inventive powers. It afforded to the common sense, even of the illiterate, a palpable and incontrovertible proof, that the ancients had not exhausted the stock of possible discoveries; and that, in matters of science, the creed of the Romish church was not infallible. In the conclusion of one of Kepler's works, we perceive the influence of these prospects on his mind. "Hæc et cætera hujusmodi latent in pandectis ævi sequentis, non antea discenda, quam librum hunc Deus arbiter sæculorum recluserit mortalibus." *

has been made by Condorcet concerning the invention of printing. "L'invention de l'Imprimerie a sans doute avancé le progrès de l'espéce humaine; mais cette invention étoit elle-même une suite de l'usage de la lecture répandu dans un grand nombre de pays." Vie du Turgot.

Epit. Astron. Copernic.

We

I have hitherto taken no notice of the effects of the revival of letters on Metaphysical, Moral, or Political science. The truth is, that little deserving of our attention occurs in any of these departments prior to the seventeenth century; and nothing which bears the most remote analogy to the rapid strides made, during the sixteenth, in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. The influence, indeed, of the reformation on the practical doctrines of ethics appears to have been great and immediate. may judge of this from a passage in Melanchthon, where he combats the pernicious and impious tenets of those theologians who maintained, that moral distinctions are created entirely by the arbitrary and revealed will of God. In opposition to this heresy he expresses himself in these memorable words :-" Wherefore our decision is this; that those precepts which learned men have committed to writing, transcribing them from the common reason and common feelings of human nature, are to be accounted as not less divine, than those contained in the tables given to Moses; and that it could not be the intention of our Maker to supersede, by a law graven upon stone, that which is written with his own finger on the table of the heart.” *— This language was, undoubtedly, a most important step towards a just system of Moral Philosophy; but still, like the other steps of the Reformers, it was only a return to common sense, and to the genuine spirit of Christianity, from the dogmas imposed on the credulity of mankind by an ambitious priesthood.† Many years were yet to elapse,

"Proinde sic statuimus, nihilo minus divina præcepta esse ea, quæ a sensu communi et naturæ judicio mutuati docti homines gentiles literis, mandârunt, quam quæ extant in ipsis saxeis Mosis tabulis. Neque ille ipse cœlestis Pater pluris a nobis fieri eas leges voluit, quas in saxo scripsit, quam quas in ipsos animorum nostrorums ensus impresserat."

Not having it in my power at present to consult Melanchthon's works, I have transcribed the foregoing paragraph on the authority of a learned German Professor, Christ. Meiners. See his Historia Doctrina de Vero Deo. Lemgoviæ, 1780, p. 12. † It is observed by Dr. Cudworth, that the doctrine which refers the original moral distinctions to the arbitrary appointment of the Deity, was strongly reprobated by the ancient fathers of the Christian church, and that " it crept up afterward in the scholastic ages; Occam being among the first that maintained, that there is no act evil, but as it is prohibited by God, and which cannot be made good, if it be commanded by him. In this doctrine he was quickly followed by Petrus Alliacus, Andreas de Novo Castro, and others." See Treatise of Immutable Morality.

It is pleasing to remark, how very generally the heresy here ascribed to Occam is now reprobated by good men of all persuasions. The Catholics have even begun to recriminate on the Reformers as the first broachers of it; and it is to be regretted, that

before any attempts were to be made to trace, with analytical accuracy, the moral phenomena of human life to their first principles in the constitution and condition of man; or even to disentangle the plain and practical lessons of ethics from the speculative and controverted articles of theological systems.*

A similar observation may be applied to the powerful appeals in the early protestant writers, to the moral judgment and moral feelings of the human race, from those casuistical subtilties, with which the schoolmen and

in some of the writings of the latter, too near approaches to it are to be found. The truth is (as Burnet long ago observed), that the effects of the reformation have not been confined to the reformed churches;-to which it may be added, that both Catholics and Protestants have, since that era, profited very largely by the general progress of the sciences and of human reason.

I quote the following sentence from a highly respectable Catholic writer on the law of nature and nations:-Qui rationem exsulare jubent a moralibus præceptis quæ in sacris literis traduntur, et in absurdam enormemque LUTHERI sententiam imprudentes incidunt (quam egregie et elegantissime refutavit Melchior Canus, Loc. Theolog. Lib. ix. et x.) et ea docent, qua si sectatores inveniant, moralia omnia susque deque miscere, et revelationem ipsam inutilem omnino et inefficacem reddere possent." (Lampredi Florentini Juris Naturæ et Gentium Theoremata, Tom. II, p. 195. Pisis, 1782.) For the continuation of the passage, which would do credit to the most liberal protestant, I must refer to the original work. The zeal of Luther for the doctrine of the Nominalists had probably prepossessed him, in his early years in favor of some of the theological tenets of Occam; and afterwards prevented him from testifying his disapprobation of them so explicity and decidedly as Melanchthon and other reformers have done.

"The theological system," says the learned and judicious Mosheim, " that now prevails in the Lutheran academies, is not of the same tenor or spirit with that which was adopted in the infancy of the Reformation. The glorious defenders of religious liberty, to whom we owe the various blessings of the Reformation, could not, at once, behold the truth in all its lustre, and in all its extent; but, as usually happens to persons that have been long accustomed to the darkness of ignorance, their approaches towards knowledge were but slow, and their views of things but imperfect." (Maclaine's Transl. of Mosheim. London, 2d ed. vol. iv. p. 19.) He afterwards mentions one of Luther's early disciples, (Amsdorff), "who was so far transported and infatuated by his excessive zeal for the supposed doctrine of his master, as to maintain, that good works are an impediment to salvation." Ibid. p. 39.

Mosheim, after remarking that "there are more excellent rules of conduct in the few practical productions of Luther and Melanchthon, than are to be found in the innumerable volumes of all the ancient casuists and moralizers," candidly acknowledges," that the notions of these great men concerning the important science of morality were far from being sufficiently accurate or extensive. Melanchthon himself, whose exquisite judgment rendered him peculiarly capable of reducing into a compendious system the elements of every science, never seems to have thought of treating morals in this manner; but has inserted, on the contrary, all his practical rules and instructions, under the theological articles that relate to the law, sin, freewill, faith, hope, and charity." Mosheim's Eccles. Hist. vol. iv. pp. 23, 24.

The same author elsewhere observes, that "the progress of morality among the reformed was obstructed by the very same means that retarded its improvement among the Lutherans; and that it was left in a rude and imperfect state by Calvin and his associates. It was neglected amidst the tumult of controversy; and, while every pen was drawn to maintain certain systems of doctrine, few were employed in cultivating that master science which has virtue, life, and manners for its objects." Ibid. pp. 120, 121.

monks of the middle ages had studied to obscure the light of nature, and to stifle the voice of conscience. These subtilties were precisely analogous in their spirit to the pia et religiosa calliditas, afterwards adopted in the casuistry of the Jesuits, and so inimitably exposed by Pascal in the Provincial Letters. The arguments against them employed by the reformers, cannot, in strict propriety, be considered as positive accessions to the stock of human knowledge; but what scientific discoveries can be compared to them in value! *

From this period may be dated the decline † of that worst of all heresies of the Romish church, which, by opposing Revelation to reason, endeavoured to extinguish the light of both; and the absurdity (so happily described by Locke) became every day more manifest, of attempting "to persuade men to put out their eyes, that they might the better receive the remote light of an invisible star by a telescope."

In the meantime, a powerful obstacle to the progress of practical morality and of sound policy, was superadded to those previously existing in catholic countries, by the rapid growth and extensive influence of the Machiavellian school. The founder of this new sect (or to speak more correctly, the systematizer and apostle of its doctrines) was born as early as 1469, that is, about ten years before Luther; and, like that reformer, acquired, by the com

"Et tamen ni doctores, angelici, cherubici, seraphici, non modo universam philosophiam ac theologiam erroribus quam plurimis inquinârunt; verum etiam in philosophiam moralem invexere sacerrima ista principia probabilissimi, methodi dirigendi intentionem, reservationis mentalis, peccati philosphici, quibus Jesuitae etiamnum mirifice delectantur." Heinecc. Elem. Histor. Phil. § cii. See also the

references.

With respect to the ethics of the Jesuits, which exhibit a very fair picture of the general state of that science, prior to the reformation, see the Provincial Letters; Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, vol. IV. p. 354; Dornford's Translation of Putter's Historical Developement of the present Political Constitution of the Germanic Empire, (vol. ii. p. 6. ;) and the Appendix to Penrose's Bampton Lectures.

I have said, the Decline of this heresy, for it was by no means immediately extirpated even in the reformed churches. "As late as the year 1598, Daniel Hofman, Professor of Divinity in the University of Helmstadt, laying hold of some particular opinions of Luther, extravagantly maintained, that philosophy was the mortal enemy of religion; that truth was divisible into two branches, the one philosophical and the other theological; and that what was true in philosophy was false in theology." Mosheim, vol. iv. p. 18.

manding superiority of his genius, an astonishing ascendant (though of a very different nature) over the minds of his followers. No writer, certainly, either in ancient or in modern times, has ever united, in a more remarkable degree, a greater variety of the most dissimilar and seemingly the most discordant gifts and attainments;-a profound acquaintance with all those arts of dissimulation and intrigue, which in the petty cabinets of Italy, were then universally confounded with political wisdom;—an imagination familiarized to the cool contemplation of whatever is perfidious or atrocious in the history of conspirators and of tyrants ;—combined with a graphical skill in holding up to laughter the comparatively harmless follies of ordinary life. His dramatic humor has been often compared to that of Molière; but it resembles it rather in comic force, than in benevolent gayety, or in chastened morality. Such as it is, however, it forms an extraordinary contrast to that strength of intellectual character, which, in one page, reminds us of the deep sense of Tacitus, and in the next, of the dark and infernal policy of Cæsar Borgia. To all this must be superadded a purity of taste, which has enabled him, as an historian, to rival the severe simplicity of the Grecian masters; and a sagacity in combining historical facts, which was afterwards to afford lights to the school of Montesquieu.

Eminent, however, as the talents of Machiavel unquestionably were, he cannot be numbered among the benefactors of mankind. In none of his writings, does he exhibit any marks of that lively sympathy with the fortunes of the human race, or of that warm zeal for the interests of truth and justice, without the guidance of which, the highest mental endowments, when applied to moral or to political researches, are in perpetual danger of mistaking their way. What is still more remarkable, he seems to have been altogether blind to the mighty changes in human affairs, which, in consequence of the recent invention of printing, were about to result from the progress of Reason and the diffusion of Knowledge. Through the whole of his Prince (the most noted as well as one of the latest of his publications) he proceeds on