it observed, with the peculiar colours of its peculiar birth-time, is very fairly capable of being named the leading principle in the political, philosophical, and religious opinions of Lord Macaulay. Our space allows us only to touch such points; but we hope that the touch, light as it is, will elicit such sparks as may enable the reader to follow, more or less adequately, the general course of our thought here.

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The philosophical opinions of Lord Macaulay are neither complicated nor abstruse. In his system the à priori has no place; everything must demonstrate its legitimacy to him à posteriori and by induction. All systems,' he says, religious, political, or scientific, are but opinions resting on evidence more or less satisfactory.' With metaphysics he will not meddle; they are beyond the province of humanity. The speculations of Hume in this field, with his Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding,' his investigation of the theory of morals, and his discourses of Palamedes concerning the state Fourli-these speculations have no other result in the eyes of Macaulay than to demonstrate the impossibility of any rational solution on such subjects; accordingly he accepts this conclusion and will inquire no further. All, however, that Hume can teach him about the liberty of the press,' the principles of government,' the science of politics,' parliament,' parties, civil liberty,' commerce,' luxury,' the balance of trade,' passive obedience,' and the Protestant succession,' he learns with avidity. Adam Smith, too, he makes his own. It is in the same spirit that he recurs to Bacon as to the great apostle of experimental science.' Bacon,' he says, 'said nothing about the grounds of moral obligation or the freedom of the human will,' but he was mightily concerned about utility and progress.' These then, utility and progress, are to Macaulay the only recommendations. An acre in Middlesex is better,' he says, 'than a principality in Utopia.' And he has no patience with that philosophy which fills the world with long words and long beards, and leaves it as wicked and as ignorant as before.' He ridicules Cicero and Seneca for that, disdaining to supply, they preposterously seek to set us above, the wants of humanity. He agrees with Bacon that the earlier Greek speculators, Democritus in particular, were superior to their more celebrated successors;' and of these latter he says: Assuredly if the tree which Socrates planted and Plato watered, is to be judged of by its flowers and leaves, it is the noblest of trees; but if we take the homely test of Bacon, if we judge of the tree by its fruit, our opinion of it may be less favourable.'

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Lord Melbourne is represented to have said once-'I wish that I was as sure of any one thing as Tom Macaulay is sure of everything. Our task here is exposition and not discussion; still we cannot help remarking that the infallible correctness ascribed by

Lord

Lord Melbourne to Macaulay, démonstrates itself, in one or two of these passages, as, after all, human. Democritus, for example (though why the inventor of the atomic theory-so wonderfully complete in almost every detail too, and the great ancient apostle of materialism-should be so much of a favourite with both Bacon and Macaulay is very plain to us), was not earlier than Socrates, but probably several years younger. At all events, he was undoubtedly contemporary with Socrates, and long survived him. The dates of Socrates are B.C. 469-399. Democritus is said by the latest authorities to have been born in the year B.C. 460, nine years after the birth of Socrates; and he is universally admitted to have reached a great age, no less, according to some, than that of 104 years. Even should we assume B.C. 470 as the birth-year of Democritus, the state of the case would remain essentially the same. Then, again, it is too bad, and indeed rather unlucky, that Macaulay should at all quarrel with Socrates, for, in truth, Socrates is the father and founder of the very system of thought professed by Bacon and by his critic after him. The age of Pericles was also an age of reason,' an era of up-lighting,' and the principle then was the principle now, the right of private judgment. For this condition of thought, Socrates was, though not by any means wholly, largely responsible, and he fell a victim to the offended traditional institutions which that principle insulted. But, this apart, there is another and a stronger reason why Socrates should be considered the father and founder of the system of thought which, since the time of Bacon, has been established among us, and it is this: Socrates was certainly the originator of generalization. This is indisputable; Socrates invented the express, the methodic, the scientific investigation of general ideas, just as certainly as Newton invented the theory of gravitation, and much more certainly than that Bacon was the first to recall attention-such is the merit assigned him by Macaulay-to the method of induction by experiment.

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Be this as it may, and passing to the political creed of Macaulay, we find this latter of a similar colour to the philosophical. 'Political science,' according to him, 'is progressive and experimental like the rest.' Ever since I began to observe,' he remarks, 'I have been seeing nothing but growth, and hearing of nothing but decay. Accordingly, he has no patience with the laudatores temporis acti, but declares them to be 'as ignorant and shallow as people generally are who extol the past at the expense of the present. He affirms that the more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils; the truth is, that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old; that which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the

humanity

humanity which remedies them.' As regards government, then, he is clearly for the doctrines of the political economists, and stands unreservedly by an almost absolute laissez faire. To all poetic theories that bear on the past, he answers by bills of mortality and tables of statistics. Social evils, in his view, must in general correct themselves; he will have no intermeddling, and confesses to a horror of all paternal government. He knows of no infallible opinion. He asks who are the wisest and best. And whose opinion is to decide that? He declares government unfit to direct our opinions, or superintend our private habits; and he sums up the whole duty of the state thus:-'Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state."

It is evident, then, that Macaulay's political and philosophical principles go hand in hand, and that they all take origin in the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Indeed, he makes no secret of this: he openly eulogizes the Encyclopædists; and it is with great complacency that he is able to assert, By this time the philosophy of the eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism from that deep taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and close alliance with the Puritanism of the seventeenth century.'

This sentence brings us, by an obvious transition, to the consideration of Macaulay's religious principles; and in these, too, we shall find him a genuine son of the philosophy of the eighteenth century. The reader, however, must take great care not to misunderstand us here. We are not going to prove Macaulay an infidel: such a charge were simply the very last we should think of bringing. What may be called his private religious feelings, Lord Macaulay never obtruded on the world, and we are not going to invade them. What we have to do with here is wholly and solely the public religious principles of Lord Macaulay. These principles, indeed, two words shall name for us at once, and these two words are-Universal Toleration. In his own language, he is as averse to Laud on the one hand as to Praise-God-Barebones on the other;' as averse to the Puritan as to the Catholic, as averse to the High Churchman as to the Independent. Exeter Hall is to him a place of intolerance; he sneers at its bray,' and speaks with contempt of its prescriptive right to talk nonsense.' In such sentiments, it is plain, he is David Hume all but in propriâ personâ. He is the supporter of an established church, but were there no

poor

His Religious Opinions.

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poor people, were there only rich people, he would be a voluntary; and, meantime, the true arrangement appears to him to be, the establishment of Episcopacy in England, of Presbyterianism in Scotland, and of Roman Catholicism in Ireland. Withal, he is a friend to the dissenters, and will stand up manfully were even a Unitarian attacked. (Speech, June 6, 1844.)

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The reader who will take the trouble to examine the essays on Gladstone on Church and State,' and on Ranke's History of the Popes,' will find a host of passages confirmatory of our position. He rejoices, for example, in the immense strides that we have made, and continually make, in mathematics and the sciences,' but he complains that with theology the case is very different.' He says, 'As regards natural religion, we are no better off now than Thales or Simonides.' The argument from design was as well known by them as by us; and the immortality of the soul is as indemonstrable now as ever.' It is a mistake,' he asserts, to imagine that subtle speculations touching the divine attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such speculations, on the contrary, are, in a peculiar manner, the delight of intelligent children and of half-civilized men.' 'But," he goes on to say, 'neither is revealed religion of the nature of progressive science;' and he remarks, significantly, that Catholic communities have, since the end of the sixteenth century, become infidel and become Catholic again; but never have become Protestant.' It seems to him that we have no security for the future against the prevalence of any theological error that ever has prevailed in time past among Christian men;' and of the Roman Catholic Church he observes: 'When we reflect on the tremendous assaults which she has survived, we find it difficult to conceive in what way she is to perish.' He thinks of Sir Thomas More and his belief in transubstantiation, of Samuel Johnson and certain of his foibles, of such subtle intellects as Bayle and Chillingworth becoming, after years of scepticism, Catholics, and So, 'for these reasons, he has ceased to wonder at any vagaries of superstition.' Very Humian is the remark: It is by no means improbable that zealots may have given their lives for a religion which had never effectually restrained their vindictive or their licentious passions.' Here, too, is a touch as if by the very pen of the same master; remarking of sects that, in power, they are bigoted, insolent, and cruel, he adds that, when out of power, they find it barbarous to punish men for entertaining conscientious scruples about a garb, about a ceremony,' &c. The same spirit is seen in this: We frequently We frequently see inquisitive and restless spirits, after questioning the existence of a Deity, bring themselves to worship a wafer.' Passages of this kind abound

in Macaulay, and even others of a still more Humian type, but these must suffice.

There is, however, a class of turns in Macaulay which have been ascribed to the circumstances of his early breeding, but which we are disposed to attribute to the same influence of Hume. Of these we should wish to give here a sample or two. Speaking in his history of Wharton, he remarks: His father was renowned as a distributor of Calvinistic tracts, and a patron of Calvinistic divines the boy's first years were past amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes, nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long.' This description is so applicable to the circumstances of Macaulay's own boyhood, that surely, if we are to ascribe the use of such language to his early breeding, it must be by means of the principle, not of action, but of reaction. In fact, there cannot be a doubt that the feeling at the bottom of such phrases is one not of reverence, but of latent derision. Macaulay, in truth, has a weakness for what we shall name a patrician or aristocratic subrision. He tells us, for example, that the French courtiers sneeringly' remarked of their grand monarque, that he was in the right not to expose to serious risk a life invaluable to his people. The sneer here is unconcealed then; and there can be no doubt that when he speaks of being brought to worship a wafer, as in a sentence just quoted, he is there, too, in the act of enjoying a gentle subrision. Now it appears to us that the following sentences are constructed on a similar model; and, if allowed to be subrisory, they must be pronounced eminently Humian.

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"Those sectaries had no scruple about smiting tyrants with the sword of Gideon.' Here and there an Achan had disgraced the good cause by stooping to plunder the Canaanites, whom he ought only to have smitten." Crawford was what they called a professor; his letters and speeches are, to use his own phraseology, exceeding savoury.' They invited Amalek and Moab to come back and try another chance with the chosen people.' 'These pious acts, prompted by the Holy Spirit, were requited by an untoward generation with,' &c. 'A pious, honest, and learned man, but of slender judgment and half crazed by his persevering endeavours to extract from Daniel and the Revelations some information about the Pope and the King of France.'

If these extracts be compared with the quotations in reference to Wharton and Louis XIV., no reader can mistake the true nature of their spirit. The turn in the last, indeed, is quite unmistakable without collation, and would hardly satisfy Dr. Cumming or the author of the Coming Struggle.' We had marked several other passages for quotation; but we think that sufficient evidence has now been led to establish the truth of our assertion, that the public religious position of Macaulay is very similar to

that