positive principles, the mere removal of abuses--a mere negative course of conduct, will never alone attain the desired end, nor is it in itself always safe and certain. Soon a rash and passionate precipitancy will be apparent in the conduct of affairs--the standard and real term of our exertions will be lost sight of, and things will fall into a ruinous course; and such is the character of that period of transition from the age of illuminism to the time of the French Revolution. Was there a single object, not only in the questions relating to humanity, but in the whole department of public life and general belief, in religion and in government, which was not soon regarded as a prejudice or an abuse? In Germany, when the Empress Maria Theresa ascended the Imperial throne, the long established peace of the empire, which it had once cost such efforts to secure and preserve, appeared to the new school of philosophy, a ridiculous prejudice of unenlightened, pedantic Burghers of state. But fifty years afterwards, during the atheistic and revolutionary period of the French philosophy, immediately prior to the French Revolution, as well as at its commencement, Christianity, and in fact all religion, was considered as a mere prejudice of the infancy of the human mind, totally destitute of foundation in truth, and no longer adapted to the spirit of the age; monarchy and the whole civilization of modern Europe as abuses no longer to be tolerated. It was only when men had reached this extreme term of their boasted enlightenment, that a re-action took place. But prior to this, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the ten years immediatedly subsequent, the spirit of the age bore all before it in its irresistible progress. As in ancient times, monarchs had competed for the title of Most Christian, or Most Catholic, so now the potentates pre-eminent for power and understanding, were flattered by the title of enlightened. It is not without a great shock to our feelings, we contemplate the close intimacy which subsisted between a monarch grown grey in the toils of war and the cares of state, a powerful Empress of a Northern court, and the most depraved champions of French infidelity. With respect to the third of those eminent potentates of the age of illuminism, Joseph II., it has never been denied by those most competent to form a correct opinion on this subject, that among the various measures and regulations passed in the short reign of that active emperor, although some are not entitled to the same praise, yet many were really adapted to the exigencies of the age, and have been attended with the most beneficial consequences to industry and to intellectual cultivation. But the serious turn which things afterwards took, the universal convulsion, and remodelling of the world, have long fully demonstrated, that not one or two only, but many of the most active and enlightened sovereigns of that age,