The history of every race, every institution, every community, and even every family, has facts, phenomena, and characteristics of its own, which are the necessary results of the operation of certain elements or influences that belong to the subject of the history, or bear upon it with a peculiar force. It is the province of the philosophical historian to seize upon these characteristic features in each ease, and to give them their due prominence; and an intimate acquaintance with them and a due estimate of them are essentially necessary to any one who understands the work of such a historian. To be deficient in this point is enough to ruin the attempt. Thus, we might have a rationalistic writer on church history free from every prejudice, and endowed with literary powers of the highest kind--candid, impartial, industrious, judicious, full of generous sympathies, and large-minded and clear-sighted enough to take rank by the side of Thucydides or Tacitus--and yet he would fail even ludicrously as a Christian historian, because he did not recognize the ever living supernatural agency which the fortunes of the church are ordinarily guided--the force of prayer, the power of sanctity, the softening and restraining influences of faith, charity, and conscience, even on men or masses of men but imperfectly masters of their own passions, and by no means unstained by vice. It is our object in these papers to give prominence to some of what may be conceded to be the more characteristic features of Christian history, which may nevertheless be left in the shade by those to whom it is little more than the history of Greece or Rome. Thus, a philosophical historian might see in the return of the Holy See from its long sojourn at Avignon a stroke of profound policy, by which it's emancipation from the straitening influences of nationalism was cheaply purchased, even at the cost of the great scandals which followed, and which a calculating politician might have foreseen. But to such a writer the manner in which the step was brought about would seem to be a riddle; for nothing is clearer than that it was consciously no stroke of policy at all. The wisest heads and the most powerful influences at the pontifical court were united against it; it was the work of an irresistible impulse on the conscience of a gentle and peace-loving Pope, the subject of a secret vow, a design conceived under the personal influence of one saintly woman--of princely race indeed, and reverend age, and large experience--but carried out under that of another in whom these last qualities were wanting; young, poor, the daughter of an artisan, yet who was able to succeed in her mission when success seemed hopeless, and to become the instrument of strengthening the successor of St. Peter in an emergency that might have taxed the courage of the great apostle himself.