Martyrs still whisper in our ears their dying confessions; the recorded deeds of faithful charity bear fruit a thousand fold, and the cup of cold water becomes in history a spring whose waters never fail. And thus does the historic page give us the very immortality of our race, so that we, however humble, may be inspired by converse with the heroes, the sages and saints of all times. "Even in their ashes live their wonted fires." That the sparks of all the sciences are buried in the ashes of the law, was the boast of a great jurist, and the sparks of every thing that animates the human heart are buried in the ashes of history. As in the calmness of a serene night we gaze into the firmament and see worlds on worlds unnumbered rise, and look upon them all as if here and present, and are thus filled with an adoring sense of the grandeur of the material frame; so in the calm and wise pages of historic contemplation, come out before us, one by one, the lights of other and of distant days, burning with unfading lustre, shaping themselves into constellations and galaxies, purer and brighter than when worn and stained by their earthly conflicts, illuminating our way, elevating our aspirations and deepening our adoring sense of the pricelessness and immortality of truth, of justice and of right.

But in its attempt to forecast the destiny of the race from its history, the necessities of the historic problem carry us to a yet higher point of view than that of human brotherhood, justice and rights. For, as we have said, it not only teaches us that moral ends will come out superior to material and selfish interests, but also that all merely human and temporal ends are to be subordinated to those which are spiritual and eternal. To understand the orbit of the earth we must take the sun as our centre; to understand the course of history we must look at it from those supernal heights, whence we can see its spiritual and eternal bearings.

And this claim is not made alone on theological grounds; it is strictly philosophical; it comes up in the attempt to spell out the meaning of the syllables of recorded time. The temple at Delphi which contained the inscription, "Know Thyself," bore also other and more mysterious letters, which many suppose should be rendered, "Thou art." And the annals of the

race are written over with a hand-writing, which we in vain attempt to refer to a human original. Its oldest traditions are not of a primitive barbarism, but of a primeval estate of culture. "I regard the original condition of mankind as one of culture,' are the words of one of the profoundest of modern philosophers. Vast ancient ruins, in their silence, point back to lost arts and an unwritten revelation. Faith in a revelation has been at the foundation of every great people of ancient or of modern times, and has been their hope and their stay. That old Jewish inspiration, secluded in the ancient world, when it came forth into the historic current, gave to it its law and its course. The turning-point between ancient and modern history was in the faith of an Incarnate God. All the great crises in human history have been judgments upon a corrupt or superstitious faith and the inauguration of a purer worship, evidences of "God's blessing breathed upon the fainting earth." The supernatural order, centering in the facts of sin and of redemption, and looking forward from time into eternity, has always gleamed through and presided over the natural in the actual faith of the race; and that can only be a real philosophy of history which recognizes the validity and supremacy of those spiritual wants and aspirations, which, like the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, have led the progressive hosts of the human family in their continuous and unreturning march, from one encampment to another of their onward course. And the philosopher who tries to explain the temporal without the eternal, the natural without the supernatural, must expurgate from earth's records the words that tell its deepest sorrows, its highest joys, its only concurrent testimony.

Just as in the last analysis, the very necessities of thought compel us to bind together the finite and the infinite, and to view the temporal as embosomed in the eternal; so do the necessities and testimony of history carry us back to a divine justice and love, and the revelation of a divine and spiritual kingdom, as the substratum and support of all that has been transacted in the history of our earth.

Only in the vision of such a kingdom, where the supremacy of man's spiritual wants is insured, can we find an end compreVOL. III.-2

hensive enough to receive into itself, the sum and substance of the whole historic course. Only then is the third condition of a true philosophy of history met and answered, that is, that it assign to the human race an adequate destiny.

4. But these three conditions of a right solution of the historic problem being met-that it take in all the facts, and give an adequate law, and an adequate consummation to the course of the history-should we then have satisfied all the needs of a scientific inquiry? We think not, until we have added one other condition, and that is, that we give to human history an adequate author.

Aristotle, after defining philosophy as the science of causes, goes on to say, that of causes there are four kinds, which he calls the material, the formal, the final and the efficient. This analysis of causes has been ever contemned; and it certainly employs the word cause in a somewhat wide sense, though in the thing itself Aristotle was wiser than his objectors. Expressed in our phraseology, he may be interpreted as meaning, that in order to know any thing philosophically, scientifically, we must know these four points: first, its matter, (material causes), second, its peculiar structure and laws, (which he calls its formal causes); third, its use or end, (its final cause); and fourth, its origin, (its efficient cause). To know it under these four aspects is to know it scientifically; and this analysis seems to be at once subtle and profound. And so we say, that to have a science of human history, we must not only have the body of its facts, the law of its growth, the end which it aims at, but also its efficient cause, the energy which has made it what it is. We are compelled to inquire after a power and wisdom adequate to bring into being and carry on that drama which human history displays before our eyes.

The problem is this: Here is a history of countless numbers of free and rational beings, placed upon an ample theatre, living in successive races and periods, through whom as the almost unconscious agents, a vast plan, reaching already through some six thousand years of time, has been working itself out towards its consummation. Nations have risen and fallen, and their growth and their decay have helped on the plan. Great

men have played their brief part upon the stage, "taken the instant by the forward top," and on their

quick'st decrees

The inaudible and noiseless foot of time

Has stolen ere they could effect them:

and yet through them has been effected a sublimer purpose, and carried on a mightier plan than any one of them has ever mastered. "They've nursed the pinion that impelled the steel," they knew not whither. They have acted freely, and their very caprice and wilfulness have been worked by an o'ermastering wisdom, into that web, whose woof no hand of man has held, and whose web and woof together have made up, one grand, consecutive, advancing history. The scroll of time has been slowly unrolled, each nation, each man, has written upon it, as he thought he would, his own brief record, and then it was rolled up, and others came and wrote; and when it is all unrolled and read, we find thereon one epic, the connected history of God and man.

Is not here the grand underlying mystery of earth's history? such a combination of freedom with necessity, such a pre-established harmony in the co-working of such multitudinous facts and instruments; such a rational order growing out of such apparent lawlessness and unconscious agencies? Some have quarried the stones, others with toil drawn them to their site, this and that one has fitted here and there a block into its place, and the edifice has risen up in glory and majesty, and the work is still going on, and no one knows just what the end shall be, no sound of a hammer is heard, and no master builder has been seen by any of the workmen, and yet the edifice is there, a sublime plan visible in its still unfinished towers, chapels, statues, pinnacles, buttresses, arches, to its stately roof, and its spire surmounted with the cross, which is also laid at its foundation! And as we behold its parts, significant of such superhuman wisdom, they all seem to ask us, Who is this master-builder? Who struck these foundations so deep into the solid earth, and raised these walls in their majestic strength, and clothed the temple within and without with such order and grace?

For the completion of our idea of the philosophy of history do we not need to add an adequate author, the builder and the master of this sublime plan of humanity? Must there not somewhere have been wisdom and power enough to make the plan and ordain the instruments, to marshal this long procession of the nations, through victory and disaster, patiently and wisely using them, planting and supplanting, guiding them over continents and oceans, using all their powers and passions, their changeful hopes and fears, as the means of carrying them on to that consummation which may be grand enough to receive into itself the trophies and heritage of all nations, kingdoms and tongues? And is not thus human history, in its very essence, religious, testifying of God, leading us unto Him in awe and worship? Is not the human race, to use the bold figure of De Maistre, attached to the throne of the Eternal by a supple chain, which holds without enslaving us, and which in the most perilous times of revolution is not broken but abruptly shortened? If the geologist may tell us of chasms in the order of the globe, which only a divine power could have bridged; if the astronomer, as he "unwinds the eternal dances of the sky," reads us a lesson from the celestial spheres, of a superhuman wisdom; if the zoologist finds a type running through the animated orders of creation, pointing back to an archetype in the divine original; does not human history also show its gulfs, where nations have been submerged, and yet which have been bridged over by a wise power, so that the catastrophe of the race has been not its extinction, but its means of resurrection? does it not reveal a sublime order of all its hosts, where the most erratic still "serve the law they seem to violate?" and also, more than any plan or type in nature, does it not offer the spectacle of a grand, advancing and victorious plan, not yet completed, and demanding, more than anything in the order of mere nature, the idea of a wise and powerful author? And thus, does not history, more even than nature, testify to the being and perfection of a a great First Cause? Can we meet and solve the problem of human history, by supposing some abstract idea, or blind law, or unconscious substance as the ultimate author? Here is one consecutive plan, working, growing, for some six thousand years s! Has an idea or a substance made this plan? Can anything ac