In Europe we are slenderly supplied with historians, and with narratives exhibiting the manners and peculiarities of successive races of men, from the time of Theodosius in the close of the fourth century of the Christian era to the end of the tenth. Mankind during that period were in an uncommon degree wrapped up in ignorance and barbarism. We may be morally sure that this was an interval beyond all others, in which superstition and an implicit faith in supernatural phenomena predominated over this portion of the globe. The laws of nature, and the everlasting chain of antecedents and consequents, were little recognised. In proportion as illumination and science have risen on the world, men have become aware that the succession of events is universally operating, and that the frame of men and animals is every where the same, modified only by causes not less unchangeable in their influence than the internal constitution of the frame itself. We have learned to explain much; we are able to predict and investigate the course of things; and the contemplative and the wise are not less intimately and profoundly persuaded that the process of natural events is sure and simple and void of all just occasion for surprise and the lifting up of hands in astonishment, where we are not yet familiarly acquainted with the developement of the elements of things, as where we are. What we have not yet mastered, we feel confidently persuaded that the investigators that come after us will reduce to rules not less obvious, familiar and comprehensible, than is to us the rising of the sun, or the progress of animal and vegetable life from the first bud and seed of existence to the last stage of decrepitude and decay. But in these ages of ignorance, when but few, and those only the most obvious, laws of nature were acknowledged, every event that was not of almost daily occurrence, was contemplated with more or less of awe and alarm. These men "saw God in clouds, and heard him in the wind." Instead of having regard only to that universal Providence, which acts not by partial impulses, but by general laws, they beheld, as they conceived, the immediate hand of the Creator, or rather, upon most occasions, of some invisible intelligence, sometimes beneficent, but perhaps oftener malignant and capricious, interfering, to baffle the foresight of the sage, to humble the pride of the intelligent, and to place the discernment of the most gifted upon a level with the drivellings of the idiot, and the ravings of the insane.