and bitter cry against what it regarded, and not wrongly, as a blasphemous and in some respects fraudulent misrepresentation of the divine character. Men did not call upon God to leave them, but upon kings and priests, who claimed to be God's agents, to stand out of the light of mankind, and let them see for themselves what the divine will and character

were.

Such at least was the case with many of the most audacious writers of the eighteenth century. Το describe Voltaire and Paine, for instance, as atheists is a gross calumny. Sour and narrow-minded pedant as he was, Robespierre believed in his Être Suprême; nor will any one who looks, with anything like an unprejudiced eye, at the theories of our own age and nation, venture to deny that, with all their confusion and conflict, they are rapidly bringing into existence an order of things which, whether good or bad, shows as much promise of stability, and of producing a powerful effect on the character of the human race, as any that has preceded it.

VOL. III

X

XVII

DE MAISTRE ON THE POPE'

DE MAISTRE was perhaps the ablest and most conspicuous of that strange and small class of writers who, being men of great ability, have a genuine intellectual sympathy with the losing side. With less unction and passion, and with a far wider experience of practical life, he closely resembled Dr. Newman. Their styles are exceedingly similar. They both write as well-bred men talk, and this gives their works a singular union of elegance and power. Each, too, possesses great logical power of a certain sort— the power of making assertions which look consistent, and asking people to believe them because they look consistent, irrespectively of the evidence by which they are supported.

There are, however, great distinctions between them. De Maistre is infinitely more confident and less sceptical than Dr. Newman. He never seems to have felt those genuine doubts as to the truth of the

1 Du Pape, suivi de l'Église Gallicane dans son rapport avec le Souverain Pontife. Par le Comte Joseph de Maistre.

fundamental parts of his creed, which form a kind of background, all the more impressive because it is so indistinct, to all Dr. Newman's opinions.

The background in De Maistre's mind is filled up, not by doubt, but by a strange mysticism which occasionally finds vent in contemptuous denunciations of all common opinions, upon the strength of some profound and, as it would seem, almost incommunicable truths locked up in his own breast. 'Bon sens,' used in a sense analogous in some degree to that in which Reid spoke of 'common-sense,' and the 'traditions' of the human race, are to De Maistre what mysteries are to Dr. Newman.

When Dr. Newman finds himself pushed by a difficulty, he always gets out of it by telling you that there are insuperable difficulties in everything. 'A mystery more or less, what does it matter?' When De Maistre finds himself in the same situation, he becomes dithyrambic, and begins to talk of some universal tradition about sacrifice or expiation, or to assert that the strictest scientific methods produce such and such mysterious results, of which the doctrine attacked is only the theological equivalent.

The most striking difference between them, however, is no doubt the difference between the student and the man of the world. Dr. Newman always writes from the point of view of a man who has passed his life amongst books. He gives his readers the impression that he has never looked face to face upon his fellow-creatures, and seen with his own eyes

what sort of things really weigh with them in the real business of life, and what sort of things are good only for students, and for them only when they have actually fixed their minds on their books.

His most characteristic writings produce upon a man of the world the effect of an unpleasant dream. By a great effort to place yourself at the author's point of view and to sympathise with him, you can arrive at feeling a certain sort of fascination for a short time; but you have only to move, and the whole thing drops off so completely that it is difficult to understand how it could ever have affected you at all.

With De Maistre it is otherwise. His arguments are never fine-spun or cloister-like. They are the natural expression and defence of the opinions of a man who lived, and felt, and played a conspicuous part in the active affairs of life. Even the dash of mystical enthusiasm which runs through all his works has a genuine tone about it. It expresses the real feelings with which an eager warm-hearted man looked upon practical affairs of the greatest interest. For instance, his doctrine about expiation, sacrifice, and the like, is not merely a history dug out of old books, and made to look a little more or less difficult, by comparing it with other things of the same sort obtained in a similar manner; it is the genuine expression of the sentiments by which he consoled himself for the storms of the French Revolution, which would otherwise have appeared to him a sort of end of the moral and religious world.

We have already made some observations on the principal speculative work of this remarkable man-the Soirées de St. Pétersbourg. His book Du Pape et de l'Église Gallicane is more definite, less mystical, and of far greater historical importance; for there can be no doubt that the ideas which it develops, and to the spread of which it largely contributed, have exercised immense influence on the modern history of France, and, through France, on the history and fortunes of Europe in general. There is every reason to believe that the history of their influence, and of the changes which it will produce in European affairs, is as yet only in its infancy.

Perhaps the worst and least philosophical of Lord Macaulay's essays is the one on Ranke's History of the Popes, which develops at great length, and, as it appears to us at least, with much exaggeration, both of phrase and of feeling, the well-known paradox that the claims of the Church of Rome are founded on imposture and destined to immortality. The famous New Zealander passage which occurs in this essay is an excellent specimen of its general character -of the gaudiness of its colouring, and of the unsubstantial, indiscriminating way in which views all but contradictory to each other are thrown into immediate juxtaposition, without the least effort to explain the difficulties which their juxtaposition suggests.

A sincere Roman Catholic might have written one half of the essay; a sincere Protestant (and Lord