The object of Mr. Lecky is to trace the history of _the spirit_ of Rationalism,--the spirit which disposes men to reject all belief founded upon authority, and to make the causes of phenomena intrinsic and not extrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Rationalism, if we rightly apprehend Mr. Lecky, is not any precise doctrine or system of doctrine, but only a diffused bias or tendency of the mind to regard the power which is operative in Nature and history as a rigidly creative or constitutive power, rather than a redemptive or formative one. Doubtless Mr. Lecky, if he should ever consider the subject, would be free to admit that the creative action implies a necessary reaction on the part of the creature. But he has manifestly no sympathy with the early or imaginative faiths of the world, which represent creation as a physical rather than a rational exhibition of the Divine power. His entire book is written in the service of the opposite conception. To be sure, he does not discuss the new faith as a theologian, but only as an historian. It is not an affair of the heart with him, but only of the head. He takes no pains to commend it as an advance in point of truth upon the old faith, and does not once even avow his own intellectual identification with it. In short, he is not the retained attorney of the new faith, but its disinterested annalist, treating it simply as an historic change wrought in the texture of men's thought, promoted by such and such causes, attested by such and such effects, but independent of all partisan judgment and clamor either favorable or adverse. Still there is no doubt of the historian's own private bias. He applauds _ex animo_ the change he records; and his book would have gained greatly in interest, if he could only have written it a little more from the heart and a little less from the head. For then, apart from the incidental advantage which would accrue to it, to the reader's imagination, as being a revelation of the author's living personality, we think the author himself could hardly fail to have seen, before he had finished his task, that there is no essential contradiction between the world's earlier and later faiths; that these faiths differ not as good and evil or true and false differ, but only and at most as root and stem and flower differ in the plant, or birth, growth, and maturity in the animal.