according to which all such development, whether intellectual, moral, or social, is, we are told, to be guided. The issue, to the Agnostic optimist, must, one would think, be surprising. The doctrine of the Rights of Man, for example, will be seen to have been founded on the supernatural. As mankind have hitherto professed it, it was essentially a theistic doctrine, a doctrine founded on the immortality of the soul: the belief in the rights of man connoted belief in a God who gave a sanction to those rights. As tried at the judgment seat of calm knowledge and sober intellect, the social part of this doctrine relies on the religious, not only for its support, but for its meaning. This was always its implied basis and generally its explicit one. It was on this Robespierre founded his extravagant Declaration; it was on this Saint Simon rested his visionary hopes and impossible schemes; while it can hardly be necessary to remind the American reader that it was on this that the whole case rested against slavery as slavery, and that it was these beliefs and these arguments that made the suppression of slavery not only possible to accomplish, but possible even to conceive or to wish for.

Now, how are the doctrines of this modern school modified by their rejection of the supernatural? To this the answer can be at once exact and final. Discrediting the old proofs of their truth, by detailed demonstration, as is thought, of their falsehood, rejecting the only conceivable foundation on which the beliefs in question have till now rested, modern Agnosticism is accomplishing, at once theoretically, and by and by will accomplish practically, the very reverse of all that their profuse prophecies of unlimited progress imply. And, first of all, let us take the example just brought up-man's equality. The economy of the Catholic Church builds up an absolute equality in salvation that comprises or can comprise, indiscriminately, all mankind. Modern Science disowns such equality. This, however, is but half the truth. It insists that they are unequal-and it does so with a harshness and a completeness of meaning that, till our day, was inconceivable. The brutality to his subjects of no oriental tyrant, the disdain of barbarians of no Grecian philospher, ever implied this inequality so fully as modern science explicitly declares it. Its whole aim and drift is to prove with increasing insistence that each man is the creature of his education and surroundings; that of his distinctively human value his body is the cause and the measure, and that not only are men's seeming inequalities real, but that in reality they are greater than they seem. No spiritual instinct or insight can pierce through and discover beneath the surface some common greatness, some treasure shared equally by all-for no

such treasure exists-but man is left the plaything of fortune, the child of circumstance.

In view of these two great defects in the dominant philosophy, its want of generalization, its utter inability to apprehend the bearing of events on each other, and its tendency to reject the supersensual, the unseen, the spiritual, it cannot be surprising to any one that it should be reluctant to recognize the supernatural as an important factor in intellectual development. For the empiricism. that meanwhile reigns is, on the one hand, so curiously without historical sense, and so indifferent to historical method, that it seems unable either to conceive or to represent any supernatural force, either in its organic growth and completeness, or in its historical relation and significance; and on the other hand, its attitude towards supernatural phenomena is, if we may borrow a term from medicine, so purely pathological that it treats and deals with a fact as old and as universal as man, as a product of disease rather than health. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the various forms of empiricism—agnostic, skeptic, positivist-are all marred by the same original blot, marked by the same fundamental inabilities, and can as little explain the origin and progress of intellectual development as they can of themselves. Loudly proclaiming their great passion to find and formulate a science of history, they have hitherto been blind to the meaning of the great historical faiths, and have been unable to tell how they sprang, why they were or are, or what purpose they served. To ask these questions is to recognize an ideal significance in religion and an ideal purpose in the mechanism of this world that were fatal to any system whose first principle is to dispense with an ideal cause and presence in the universe. And hence, the philosophy that does not rise and end in the supernatural is a sapless, withered rationalism; its reason is like an eyeless socket, vainly illumined by the sun.

As with philosophy, so is it with literature. Literature will lose just as much as philosophy. "All its sublimity, its brilliance, and the great part of its interest depend on the idea of the supernatural, and would, in its absence, be absolutely unproducible." The aim of the supernatural--to change a living writer's metaphor—is, indeed, to make the soul a musical instrument which may yield music either to itself or to others at any appulse from without; and the more intense and real the idea is, the richer and more composite can this music be. Without the supernatural literature is like a simple pastoral pipe that will produce but one melody, and that not an elaborate one, rather a "deep andante moving in a bass of sorrow," which rolls so mournfully through the writings of our "modern galaxy of tuneful anarchists and pantheistic bacchants."

The grandest conceptions of the mind have their source in religious convictions. What is it that gives intensity to our thoughts, as a presence becomes awful when shrouded or enlarged, as vastness, or height, or depth is expanded towards the Infinite? Is it not that we recognize an existence higher than the natural? The tenderness and delicacy of the Hindoo epics evince it; the grandeur and sublimity of Greek poesy testify to it; the Holy Scriptures, the richest inheritance of the ages, prove it; and the response of the human mind demonstrates it. From the conditions of the mind and the imagination there arises for man a new world, a new order of being, which is recognized by every race and every age. This conception of the supernatural pervades every department of literature; it intrudes on the domain of painting and sculpture; it guides the imagination through the land of reverie and romance, and reigns unquestioned in the realms of poetry and philosophy. The highest culture serves but to grace it with every delight of fancy and refinement, and the grossest ignorance produces but a deplorable, fantastic exaggeration.

In earliest ages every forest and glen was the home of nymph or fawn; all nature was animate with invisible genii. The poet loved to sing of their graceful forms and people harsh nature with lovely images. It was a beautiful thought; and Grecian poetry still whispers it in our delighted ears. But in the oriental mind, these ideas attained a more complete development. The Arabian Nights contain the wildest flights of human imagination; the laws of nature are entirely disregarded; the natural blends with the supernatural, and space itself is thickly inhabited. Wizards, fiends, shipwrecked sailors, and wandering princes hurry across the stage; stately palaces, enchanted castles, and sumptuous mystic caverns meet our view; and fairies, furies, sultans, and beggars appear and disappear like the figures in a kaleidoscope. They are the dreams of the opium-eater, light, airy, and fantastic like the mosque and minaret beneath whose shadow they spring into existence.

It is merely stating an exact truth to say that poets to be great must be Christian. But Homer and Hesiod, Sophocles and Euripides, Eschylus and Pindar were great poets! True; but they had instincts and mental tendencies identical with those of Christians. They had a reverence for the spiritual world and divine authority. They never dreamed of atheism, agnosticism, materialism, or rationalism. It may, indeed, be urged that the great men, the cultured, representative men of old refused to credit much. of the popular belief. It must be remembered that the supernatural in the ancient world of Paganism was something exceedingly unsettled and intermediate, and our classical divinity, though, of course, to some extent, an embodiment of it, does, in reality, em

body but a very small part. Zeus and the minor gods of Olympus were vaguely conceived to be surrounded by some deeper mystery which, to the popular intelligence, was altogether undefined, and which even such men as Xenophon and Plato could only describe by extraordinarily confused and inadequate concepts.

The supernatural was a twilight, dim and diffused, but Christianity has brought it to a focus, and collected and concentrated the scattered rays that before were altogether imperceptible. "That vague idea of the Good' of which Plato said most men dimly augured the existence, but could not clearly express their augury, has been given a definite shape to by Christianity in the form of its Deity," the father of the human soul, and its arbiter, and what is incomparably more, its final rest, its delight, its desire. In the light of this thought, man stands out a vaster being, and every detail in the life of a human soul becomes more important beyond all comparison, unspeakably more momentous than the myriad worlds around. Ancient pagan literature had its supernatural, exercising a very potent influence on the grandest intellectual products of the age. The forms under which it was conceived were, it is true, most inadequate and most false; but through the depraved and dusky form there are certain to come beams of eternal truth, broken and scattered, straggling and refracted, by the intervening prisms of ignorance and error, but beams still that can help to interpret the universe, which, viewed through the most approved medium of the philosophy of matter, is but an infinite blank wall, confronted by an ignorance that never looks so hopelessly imbecile as when it pretends to be knowledge.

And now we feel no reader will find it irksome to accompany the "star-quenching angel of the dawn," as he travelled, nearly seven centuries ago, "with broad, slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the frosty Caucasus across the Alpine ridges to the dark nakedness of the western isles,” and resting on the sweet quiet bosom of the Bay of Naples, view the softest sunrise that ever lit up the east, or view the most gorgeous sunset that ever sank below the west. Our purpose, however, will carry us farther north. Let us leave, then, sweet Naples, pass by Rome with its classical antiquity, stop but a moment at ocean-born Venice, " rising with her tiara of proud towers," and keep on our way to the capital of France, to Paris, the fountain of fashion and the seat of science. Collected together in this splendid city, from England and Germany, from Italy and the East, was the highest that could be found at that day of courage, eloquence, and learning, the flower of chivalry, the depth of science, troubadours and minstrels, wits and beauties. Here were fostered the disciples of Averroës, the most celebrated of Arabian philosophers;

astrologers from Bagdad, with their loose garments and flowing beards; and Hebrews, learned and sedate, the interpreters of the hidden wisdom of precious manuscripts brought over from Arabia; learned professors of Humanities and Rhetoric, mature and masterly doctors of Philosophy; while men of profound scholarship poured forth the wealth of their accumulated learning in the University chairs of Theology. Let the reader fancy, if he can, the agitation that prevailed in Paris on the 23d of October, 1257, when the two noblest children of St. Francis and St. Dominic-Bonaventure and Thomas of Aquin-were to make their “public act" for the highest academical honors. Whoever knows anything of academical life, of doctors and lecturers, of students and professors, of those whose life labors are spent in unwavering devotion to literature and learning, and of the texture of their minds, can paint for himself a picture of the excited preliminary debates in the very streets of the University town, as men gathered in groups and bands to discuss and canvass the probable issue of the coming intellectual joust. He will see the long files of Dominicansclothed in their religious habit that seems to blot out all idea of sensual admiration and carries away the mind into a loftier sphere, a higher range of thought, where beauty of far nobler sort finds. congenial habitation-advancing from their convent, L'ancien St. Jacques, with elastic tread, and a perceptible expression of satisfaction, as they pick their passage through students, professors, and wondering crowds, towards the episcopal palace, where they will see their brother Thomas receive his ring and cap. The children of St. Francis, too, clad in their habit of coarse brown serge, girdled with their knotted cord, move somewhat more rapidly than usual their sandaled feet to witness Bonaventure display his wondrous knowledge before the assembled learning of Europe.

To defend a wide field of theological and philosophical truth before such an assembly and against the longest and keenest heads and the most skilful and practiced dialecticians, against well-seasoned professors and the elite of every Faculty, required a stout heart, a clear intellect, and an imperturbable coolness and self-possession which the pigmy intellects of our day, in spite of their endless boasting of enlightenment, and inane insistence on progress and originality, could never furnish.

Seated in their chairs on a raised platform, in view of the whole multitude, sit solemn and majestic the authorities of the University -the highest exponents of learning in the then civilized worldarrayed in the various robes symbolical of their various offices, and the different insignia representative of their different degrees: Bishops and Doctors of Divinity; Jurists and Canonists; Rectors and Provosts; Masters and Bachelors; Superiors of Religious