“The books and traditions of a sect may contain, mingled with propositions strictly theological, other propositions, purporting to rest on the same authority, which relate to physics. If new discoveries should throw discredit on the physical propositions, the theological propositions, unless they can be separated from the physical propositions, will share in their discredit.” These things are very well in their way; but it is indeed questionable whether they do not appertain rather to the trickery of thought’s vehicle, than to thought itself—rather to reason’s shadow than to reason. Truth, for truth’s sake, is seldom so enforced. It is scarcely too much to say that the style of the profound thinker is never closely logical. Here we might instance George Combe—than whom a more candid reasoner never, perhaps, wrote or spoke—than whom a more complete antipodes to Babington Macaulay there certainly never existed. The former _reasons_ to discover the true. The latter _argues_ to convince the world, and, in arguing, not unfrequently surprises himself into conviction. What Combe appear to Macaulay it would be a difficult thing to say. What Macaulay is thought of by Combe we can understand very well. The man who looks at an argument in its details alone, will not fail to be misled by the one; while he who keeps steadily in view the _generality_ of a thesis will always at least approximate the truth under guidance of the other. Macaulay’s tendency—and the tendency of mere logic in general—to concentrate force upon minutiæ, at the expense of a subject as a whole, is well instanced in an article (in the volume now before us) on Ranke’s History of the Popes. This article is called a review—possibly because it is anything else—_as lucus_ is _lucus a non lucendo_. In fact it is nothing more than a beautifully written treatise on the main theme of Ranke himself; the whole matter of the treatise being deduced from the History. In the way of criticism there is nothing worth the name. The strength of the essayist is put forth to account for the progress of Romanism by maintaining that divinity is not a progressive science. The enigmas, says he in substance, which perplex the natural theologian are the same in all ages, while the Bible, where alone we are to seek revealed truth, has always been what it is.