M. Lanfrey would perhaps write, nor yet a rabid denunciation of philosophy such as M. Louis Veuillot would certainly produce. M. Bartholmèss believes that the search after metaphysical truth is one of the legitimate uses of those intellectual faculties which have been bestowed upon us by God, and he cannot see how such a study, when properly conducted, can lead to atheism or irreligion. This is just our own opinion. It is a pleasant thing to find that M. Bartholmèss, a Protestant, a man of piety and of real faith, has taken up his position as the champion of philosophy, at a time when metaphysical science is honoured with a sentence of proscription by two opposite parties in France-the materialists of the Feuerbach school, on the one side, and the votaries of Ultramontanism on the other. If we are rightly informed, the avowedly Protestant and spiritualist tendency of the Histoire des Doctrines has created amongst the members of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, to which M. Bartholmèss belongs, an unmistakeable opposition. Alas! and to think that with a few honourable exceptions, the French spiritualist writers, whom we remember as the teachers twenty years ago, should now have surrendered either to positivism or to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary! The deplorably low ebb to which French literature has sunk is an object of universal notice and of universal regret. But can it be otherwise, when men whose talent has marked out for them the foremost place amongst the educators of the present generation, a Nisard, a Sainte-Beuve, a Leverrier parade unblushingly before the world that want of principle, that servility, that moral degradation which forms the saddest contrast with their intellectual powers? We can hardly feel astonished that such men are ashamed to see in the midst of them either Bartholmèss or the learned historian of Gnosticism, M. Matter. Under the present régime, and whilst, as the Examiner said the other day, Tartuffe s'en-va-t-en guerre, the French Protestants are nearly the only fraction of the community that have tenaciously clung to independence of thought, and boldly asserted it. As the times go, this is no slight merit.

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ART. III.-1. Bacon's Novum Organum and Advancement of Learning. London: Bohn.

2. Baumgarten's Apostolic History. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.

3. Israel in the World; or, the Mission of the Hebrews to the great Military Monarchies. By W. H. JOHNSTone, M.A. London: Shaw.

4. Humboldt's Cosmos. London: Bohn.

5. On the Origin of Civilization. A Lecture by HIS GRACE THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. London: Nisbet.

THERE is apparently no closer connexion between the volumes above enumerated than in a bundle of old plays, pamphlets, and sermons, stitched together and laid by as learned lumber. They seem as ill-assorted as the books collected and sent out to the Crimea, when racing calendars and unsaleable sermons, five-act original tragedies and castoff library novels, were bestowed on the principle with which the host in Horace loaded his friend on departing, with pears: "Take them, I pray you; if not, to-morrow they must be thrown to the pigs."

We must pray our readers to be patient while we endeavour to trace out the filament of thought which connects together authors so various, and extending over so many departments. Restitution is the thread of connexion we propose to trace through the labyrinth of so many minds. Had the subject been definitely handled in the sense we understand it by one or two well-known writers, we might have dismissed the rest, and concentrated our criticism on them. But this is not so. Not that in theology proper there is any novelty in the subject of restitution. Origen's opinions are well known, and from his day to ours universalism, or "God's general amnesty," has re-appeared in one form or another from time to time.

Of restitution as a form of universalism we have nothing here to say. Redemption, we hold, is properly of persons, and restitution only of things. To distinguish-the Church is redeemed, and the world will be restored. They cannot be confounded together. It is improper to speak of the restitution of persons. Thus Mr. Bailey, the author of "Festus," better poet than philosopher, attempts to describe the transformation of Satan, at a word of forgiveness, into a happy, holy spirit. But this exorcism of evil, Satan casting out Satan, does not succeed; the sublime falls into the ridicu

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lous, and instead of the grand conflict of good and evil, Satan with blasted brow, defiant though in pain, proud though subdued, a transformation is seen light as Harlequin, and frivolous as if good and evil were a French ballet des anges.

To dismiss at once such universalist schemes of restitution with the distinct admission, in limine, that we know of no restitution save as springing out of redemption, and that we know of no redemption but by faith in the Son of God incarnate and crucified, we proceed to ascertain in what other sense restitution may be understood.

Restitution is the Christian theory of human progress, and the true philosophy of history. At a loss for a better name we will call it Meliora, or the upward working of things since the Fall. It is either a theory, a sentiment, or a creed, according as men are philosophers, poets, or divines.

Thus it is the song of the poet: it is Tennyson's "increasing purpose," which enlarges with the cycle of the suns; it is a "ringing out the darkness of the land,” a “ringing in the Christ that is to be;" it is Charles Mackay's "good time coming;" and all the poets, major and minor, from the Laureate downwards, have sung of those days. The tone of their vaticinations is better, that is, less heathenish, than those of our socalled Augustan age. It is not the well-known prophecy of Virgil thrown into an ode like "the Messiah” of Pope. It is better than this, because it depicts a triumph of good over evil, a reign of right in the place of one of might; it is not a millennium of plenty, a dispensation of Bacchus and Ceres, but one of the family rights respected, and a man more precious than a wedge of the gold of Ophir. It cannot be denied that there is a fine Christian tone in these hopes of the poets, and for this reason we set them down as one of the three classes interested in Meliora.

Restitution, again, is a theory of human progress; it is the true philosophy of history. There are eminent historians who have thought that the differences of mankind must end in agreement; that Meliora will become Optima; that deterioration of race is partial and exceptive, and progress continual and increasing; and that as the starting point of man, in a state of nature, is the naked smeared savage, as the starting point of science is brute sensation and appetite, and fetichism the starting point of the absolute religion, so the goal of all these is human perfectibility.

A theory of human progress has thus been constructed which must end in error, because it sets out with two wrong

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assumptions. The first is, that man's state of nature is the savage. But who ever heard of the savage reclaiming himself? Recent research has shown that savages, so far from advancing, continually deteriorate. Thus Mr. Taylor, in his "Te-ika-a-Maui," recently published, writes, "The New Zealander has retrograded even since the days of Cook; they had large double canoes decked with houses on them, similar to those of Tahiti and Hawaii, in which traditionally some of their ancestors came. It is now nearly fifty years since the last was seen. Tradition also states that they had finer garments in former days, and of different kinds; that like their reputed ancestors they made cloth from the bark of trees; the name is preserved, but the manufacture has ceased. There are remains also in the language which lead us to suppose that, like the inhabitants of Tonga, they once possessed a kingly form of government." Again, of their language, "its fulness, its richness, its close affinity, not only in words, but grammar, to the Sanscrit, carry us back to the time when literature could not have been unknown." Mr. Taylor well remarks, in summing up these proofs of degeneracy, "like "like a ship in a storm which is compelled to be lightened, the richest wares are thrown overboard, one bale follows another, the least required for the preservation of life go first, and those only which are essential are preserved." The second false assumption is, that man, setting out from the zero of the savage state, advances of himself linearly forward towards perfection. Progressive tendencies only are taken into account, the retrograde effects of sin are left out of view. The forward movements of society are spiral, not linear. Were man what he ought to be, he would proceed as if along the axis of the spiral, as it is while there is a forward movement; on the whole he may be said to gyrate so between good and evil, that the progress is sometimes. scarcely perceptible. The key to a knowledge of man's history is the fall in Adam. Restitution, then, or the philosophy of history, must stand on a religious basis or not at all.

Once and again, indeed, philosophy catches a gleam of light on man's purpose and mission, but it is at once dispelled by a cross glare of false science. Thus Humboldt, who lacked but one thing to make him the philosopher of history, the decipherer of the alphabet of thought and progress, touches the true solution and again glances off. Thus he writes, "watching a wretched group of Indians squatting stupidly round their fires, besmeared with grease and paint, and devouring ants and clay, that were it not for science,

which teaches us that such is the crude material of humanity, he should look on these as the last degraded remnants of a fallen and dying race." Would that Humboldt had known that the sentiment he was here giving way to was the truth; the science he drew back upon, the lie. His feelings caught at the spiral theory of human progress, his philosophy flung him back on the linear. The Orpheus of philosophy had almost charmed back the lost Eurydice of religious restitution; but one glance back to the cold pit of science, and she was gone.

There is a third class of restitutionists- the religious. Their authority for this doctrine is the sure Word of God. Prophecy has predicted that a time is coming when the longprotracted strife between good and evil, holiness and sin, will be at last decided, when righteousness shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

There is a passage in the "Restoration of Belief” which expresses the Christian doctrine of restitution in language as noble as the subject is elevated :

"I look forward to a time when national distinctions of race, language, and geographical location shall continually be melting away, at least so far as they may ultimately be obstructive of the brotherhood of the human family. That centralization-apart from universal empire-which a true understanding of the conditions of social well-being tends to bring about, and which it is now in course of bringing about, is, I think, embraced or implied throughout the prophetic writings. On the same grounds I look for a future time, when right for the many, or, better expressed, when right for all, shall be the sovereign and irresistible principle in every community. As to right for the many it has taken to itself a conventional meaning which differs little, if at all, from a periodic overthrow of society, such as may give the undermost class their time of plunder. But right for all, means social stability; and this one idea of stability, as opposed to anarchy and to periodic convulsion, meets us everywhere on the prophetic pages. Then, as the consequence of this my first anticipation, I look for a time when the material welfare, or, as we say, the earthly and daily comfort and enjoyment of the many, or let us rather say, of all, so that we may exclude that banditti meaning which radicalism clings to, this secure holding of the most needful things of life, shall be so much thought of as shall in fact realise it in a continually more and more complete manner. Between the two co-operative influences of an iron sense of right and justice on the one hand, and of humanizing and soft-hearted sympathies on the other, an intense feeling shall pervade the social mass. under the operation of which, want-still incident, as it must be, to man-and squalor and houseless discomfort, and, what is worse, cellared wretchedness and