In preference, however, to the admission of a free agency in the affairs of the universe, he subscribes to the stoicism of Grecian philosophy, which subjects all things to a stern, unbending necessity, and makes men act by the impulse and determination of their nature. “This system offered a support in their hour of trial, not only to many illustrious Greeks, but also to some of the great philosophers, statesmen, generals, and emperors of Rome--a system which excluded chance from everything, and asserted the direction of all events by irresistible necessity to the promotion of perfect good; a system of earnestness, sternness, austerity, virtue--a protest in favor of the common sense of mankind. And perhaps we shall not dissent from the remark of Montesquieu, who affirms that the destruction of the Stoics was a great calamity to the human race; for they alone made great citizens, great men.” Men can therefore be great in Draper’s sense when they can no longer be virtuous; they can acquire fame and win the gratitude of posterity when they can no longer merit; in a word, mechanical necessity; the same inexorable fatality which impels the river-waters to seek the sea, which turns the magnet to the north, and makes the planets run their destined courses, presides over the conduct of men, and elevates, ennobles their actions. Free-will is chance; Providence an impertinent and debasing interference; and virtue the firmness, born of necessity, which made Cato end his days by his own hand. Such is Draper’s substitute in the moral order for the teachings of Christianity--a system inevitably tending to build a Paphian temple on the site of every Christian church, and to revive the infamies which the pen of Juvenal so scathingly satirized, and for which S. Paul rebuked the Romans in terms of frightful severity and reprobation. For what consideration can restrain human passions, if men deem their actions to be a necessary growth or expansion of their nature, if the good and bad in human deeds are as the tempest that wrecks, or the gentle dews that fructify and animate the vegetable world? His whole book is a cumbersome and disjointed argument in favor of necessity, as opposed to free agency; of law, as opposed to Providence. The manner of his refuting the existence of divine Providence is so far novel and original that we are tempted to reproduce it for those of our readers who prefer not to lose time by perusing the work in full. On page 243 he says: “Were we set in the midst of the great nebula of Orion, how transcendently magnificent the scene! The vast transformation, the condensations of a fiery mist into worlds, might seem worthy of the immediate presence, the supervision, of God; here, at our distant station, where millions of miles are inappreciable to our eyes, and suns seem no bigger than motes in the air, that nebula is more insignificant than the faintest cloud. Galileo, in his description of the constellation of Orion, did not think