“The first explains nothing, because it professedly ignores the final destination of humanity. Sitting amid the ruins, with its back turned to the future, it contents itself with making an inventory of the bones of the defunct generations, and weighing their dust. As the conclusion of this fruitless and melancholy work, it says: Things were thus and so, because they had to be so; they are either games of chance or evolutions of the universal substance. It is quite otherwise with that theory derived from the revelation of the divine plan by the way of faith, in which all the events of the world are viewed as an execution of a pre-conceived design of Providence, being nothing else than the restoration of fallen humanity by the Mediator. This is the true philosophy of history, illuminating the past of which it furnishes the explanation, and the future of which it gives foresight. In accordance with its results, the ancient era of the world can be defined, the preparation for the reign of the Messias, and the modern era, the reign of the Messias.” In this present article it is especially some parts of the preparation which immediately preceded the epoch of the Messias that are presented to the reader’s consideration. It is one of the most interesting and useful fields of exploration upon which any one who has taste and time for solid reading can enter. There are not wanting in our modern literature some excellent works in which the desirable information can be obtained. In the German language the _Universal History_ of Leo, in the first part, on ancient history, presents a condensed but most complete, learned, and philosophical sketch of the great historical events of the pre-Christian period, conceived entirely in accordance with the idea we have here endeavored to present. In French, the _History of the Universal Church_, by Rohrbacher, has remarkable merit in this respect and is very full in its details. This subject is treated most explicitly and comprehensively in a work by M. l’Abbé Louis Leroy, entitled _Philosophie Catholique de l’Histoire_. In English the learned works of Father Thébaud, and a recent one entitled _De Ecclesiâ et Cathedrâ_, by Colin Lindsay, are especially valuable. As a French bishop, Mgr. Angebault, of Angers, has said: “For the last hundred years an effort has been kept up to make history lie by perverting it; it is requisite that men of learning and sound faith should bring it back into the right path from which it has been drawn away.”