things, "the food that the swine did eat." That spurious school of philosophy that called itself Neo-Platonic attempted to show its reverence for the noblest and the most spacious intellect the world has ever known by stretching those few problems as to our human faculties which Plato had left as indeterminate till they covered with doubt all those far greater problems of which he had determined the solution; in short, by presenting his solutions as the only difficulties, and stating his difficulties as the only solutions. When the Neo-Platonist Carneades proved to the wondering youth of Rome that the most opposite moral convictions were equally true and equally false, no wonder that the old Roman censor had an indistinct feeling that Rome had never got her iron hold of the world by building on such sand as that; and no wonder that he asserted that the reception of such a creed (if it could be received) must undermine the empire. But even then it was undermined, and social corruption was making room for the intellectual unreality by which it is always followed. The young Romans drank in the verbiage of the Greek schools, and were now and then startled by the negative wisdom of the Stoic reaction. But even an Epictetus was a poor remedy for a Domitian; and in order to prevent the inordinate growth of human desire from resolving man back again into the literal dust of the earth, it required the intervention of a mightier faith than Stoicism, and stronger representatives than either Aurelius or Julian. And when, after the Christian faith had been preached for centuries, Justinian at length abolished together the nominal consulship of Rome and the schools of Athens, he did but take away what had long been the mere monuments of two extinct civilisations; for the faith of Christ had long proved itself stronger to construct civil order than Rome under her strongest consul, and more powerful to cope with the intoxicating selfishness of human society than the Academy under its greatest teacher. The wonderful political shell of the great Roman system had been entered and appropriated by a more enduring power; and the wonderful intellectual shell of the great Platonic system had been entered and appropriated by a more enduring genius.

We see, then, that civilisation-or the tendency which draws men into wider and more varied social intercourse-has no charter of indemnity against the morally corrupting influences which exist in uncivilised and civilised man alike, but rather that they act more powerfully through social channels. There are three marked stages in which these influences have been seen to disturb and decompose the social fabric which civilisation forms. First, the selfish desires of man resist the natural distribution of the physical, intellectual, nay, even the moral and spiritual, blessings that civilisation brings, and create the wide class-chasms of the first

stage of civilisation. Next, if these are broken down, the same disease has shown itself in exaggerating, if we may so say, the socialising force itself, and tempting men away from those inner spheres of life in which their fitness for society is formed, and thus sacrificing individual, domestic, and local obligations to a wider and more superficial, though more intoxicating, class of influences. And lastly, there is the stage in which society, thus decomposed within, becomes a social body without a soul; and recognising selfish need as its only remaining bond, gradually breaks up into destructive anarchy, and resigns back again to a state far worse than any barbarism, those whom it could never have drawn together at all but for their recognition of some higher law.

It is strange indeed, with such a history as this before him, that Mr. Buckle can suppose intellectual activity to be the real dynamics of society,-drawing men from barbarism into civilisation. Was there ever a day or a people whose intellectual activity was so marvellous, or the attempts of philosophy so full of promise, as in Greece in the time of Aristotle and Plato? The Greeks had the inductive method on which modern science builds so much; and Mr. Grote has told us what a revolution its first application by Socrates caused in the world of thought. They had the deductive method with which to reinforce and extend the results of inductions. They used both with brilliant success. True, replies our author, but there was no diffusion; the knowledge was not among the people, it was not the atmosphere they breathed, but in a separate stratum of society. What is this but to say that intellectual activity, taken alone, has no diffusive force adequate to its task of civilising man,-that it has not within itself any principle of contagion so strong as to "find its own level" in the great human society,-that it does not kindle, even in those of whom it does take strong hold, any enthusiasm for the work of carrying it abroad to the minds of the dull, the indifferent, and the ignorant lover of pleasure,-in short, that, as is the case with physical wealth, the ordinary forces of human nature tend to accumulate it in fixed masses, not to spread it equally over the race? But if intellectual activity does not counteract the selfish spirit of monopoly and the selfish spirit of inertia in human nature, far less does it counteract the other tendencies which we have noted in the decomposing stages of civilisation. The history of the revival of learning in Florence and Rome in the days of the Medicis would alone show, if the civilisation of Athens were not a sufficient example, how brilliant intellectual activity may in itself even aid that absorbing intoxication of society which trenches upon the strength of individual character, and breaks up the minuter circles and weakens the more primitive bonds of family life. It provides a common

source of enjoyment fitted for a wide social field, draws men out of their own narrow field of experience, and distracts them from haunting memories of broken purposes and neglected claims, just because it is not mere hollowness, because it is not so easily exhausted, as mere artificial social life. Nevertheless it fails utterly as a permanent bond even of the outer framework of society at large. For the passions, which it does not even strive to repress, soon snap the slender threads of intellectual esteem and sympathy; and the intellect is soon got under by coarser forces, from its pure lack of power to hold the reins of the mind.

The utter incoherence of all states of society in which the only unity was intellectual, is an historical fact which Mr. Buckle apparently regards as accidental. His three counter-statements appear to be-(1) that if civilisation require any other than an intellectual aid, the matter is hopeless, as religion, and every thing indeed except scientific truth, contracts immediately to the moral dimensions of the people to whom it is brought; (2) that what our author terms the greatest evils of the world's history, war and persecution on account of private opinion, have been lessened by the intellect, and by it alone-while the one has been fostered, the other almost produced, by religious faith; and (3) that in point of fact the periods of most rapidly advancing civilisation in modern history have been periods of sceptical inquiry. Here is a general issue enough, which no one who has a tenth part of Mr. Buckle's knowledge, without his somewhat antiquated prejudice for the mild gospel of the enlightened understanding, would hesitate for a moment to accept. He is perhaps nearly the only learned and moderately able thinker of the present day who still believes implicitly that " calm inquiry" is the one remedy for the manifold sins and miscries of social existence; who still regards war as unmixed evil, and cannot see what a purifying discipline it may prove for deeper ills; or who would compare for a moment the evils of dogmatic persecution, frightful as they have been and are, with the putrid diseases of some really intellectual and many non-persecuting civilisations. If Mr. Buckle indeed thinks, as he would seem to think, that Marcus Aurelius and Julian were more mischievous to the civilisation of their day than Commodus and Heliogabalus, simply because the former were persecutors and the latter were not, we find his moral measure of things so totally different from our own, that there is scarcely a common basis for discussion.†

Mr. Buckle's mild dogmatism is often very amusing. After a thin argument, demonstrating that intellectual excellence is "far more productive of real good" than moral excellence, he adds naïvely, "These conclusions are no doubt very unpalatable; and what makes them peculiarly offensive is, that it is impossible to refute them."

† See pp. 167, 168: "There is no instance on record of an ignorant man who,

Mr. Buckle's first plea, that faith, as a civilising agent, is zero; that it is not, and cannot be, a plus quantity in the agencies of the world at all; that it so immediately contracts to the shape and quality of the minds it enters as to become whatever they already are, no more and no less,-is not easy to refute, except by the facts of history. It arises, however, in the confusion, which is completely ingrained into Mr. Buckle's book, between an opinion and a trust. He would not deny, we imagine, that a real reliance, a leaning on a higher human being, -a being morally and spiritually higher than ourselves,-does affect the character, and draws it up towards that higher mind. It is because he regards a faith as a mere moral and intellectual product of the state of mind, spun like the spider's web out of the mind, that he doubts this in regard to religion. He would be very much surprised to hear it argued, that his own sympathy with, and reverence for, a friend could not change him, on the ground that his friend's image must be immediately coloured and affected with all his own characteristics of thought. He would reply at once, that if so, individual and social life are the same; that no man can change society, and that society can change no man. And yet that is his argument concerning religious trust; although, as is evident from one part of his book, he does not question the real existence of the object of faith.

But the only effectual answer to Mr. Buckle's argument, that Christian faith could not have done any thing for civilisation, is to take a little evidence as to what it did. He will scarcely deny that it did something for the societies of the early Christian church; that it did something for St. Paul, for instance, and for some of his followers. Finding such a society as we have described, during the downfall of Greek and Roman civilisation; finding a society stained by vices such as those with which Corinth and Rome were but too familiar, as we do not need St. Paul's letters to testify; finding a decaying body, full of all rottenness,-his faith restored to it, in St. Paul's mind and that of his disciples, a spiritual unity, a new life, a cohering power, which no human shock could destroy. Society reassumed, through their new trust, so far as their influence reached it, the having good intentions, and supreme power to enforce them, has not done far more evil than good. But if you diminish the sincerity of that man, if you can mix some alloy with his motives, you will likewise diminish the evil that he works." And then Mr. Buckle instances the cases above mentioned. We do not suppose he means to weigh Aurelius and Julian, in their whole personal influence, against Commodus and Heliogabalus; but unless he means to weigh their respective influence on civilisation, there is no point or meaning in the illustration. There can be no doubt that the pure lives of Marcus Aurelius and Julian really did far more for Christianity, by showing the moral exhaustion of the noblest pagan philosophy, than they could possibly have effected had not their lives been so strenuous and faithful to their own standard.

unity it had lost; and St. Paul speaks of the various members of the "one body" as though he had again forgotten the utter corruptness he had so often alluded to, in the profligate Greek city to which he writes. The mere opening of a few Christian hearts to the trust that, amid all this confusion and evil, men were still capable of doing the will and receiving the purifying power of God, gave the system of society a new strength and soundness, and enabled them gradually to withdraw their life from the slavery to social impurities, in which they had plunged the deeper that they could never appease their hunger for something deeper and more exciting still. This sudden access of religious fervour, Mr. Buckle might say, is a well-known phenomenon,—the fanaticism of the world's reaction from its own excesses, assuming the form of a strict and visionary fraternity. No doubt; but nevertheless the phenomenon had a vitality; for from that time the history of social decay was measured back again in the reverse order. First, the social bond was renovated, assuming a purely religious character, and often renovated even at a temporary expense of other ties; then those other ties were gradually purified and strengthened; lastly, class-divisions were softened and shaded away. But, first of all, the new religious constitution of society bore down almost all other ties before it: "Those of one house were divided, the mother against her daughter-in-law, and the daughter against her mother-in-law." Secular social relations, too, were left untouched. This new faith had not yet strength to remodel the old civil ties on a new principle, or even to recognise their essential importance to the healthy action of social life. But when the religious tie became firm and indissoluble, Christian faith inevitably busied itself with the general secular relations of men, alleviating soonest those that were most obviously oppressive, recognising least completely the divine character of those that were most spoiled indeed, but spoiled by no outward wrong, and remediable rather by internal than by external influence. The Church soon became the richest power in the community, and very soon, therefore, possessed a large proportion of the slaves: she was the kindest power, and therefore soon raised their condition above that of slaves. A recent writer thus describes this state of things:

"She became rich; and her riches were not only calculated in provinces, but in hundreds of thousands of human beings. These beings were chained to her will as they had been chained to that of the Roman patrician or Frankish chief, who had bought them at Treves or London. She did not, however, manumit; for she could not do so without destroying the value of the property she had acquired. Her lands were worthless without cultivators; and none but slaves were left or adapted for that work. She, however, gave an earnest