large; forms a point of transition from past ages, or opens a passage to some manifestation of divine power, with respect to the future. In the progress of human civilisation, such designs are frequently manifest. Nay, on the great question of the permission of evil, when it exerts a widely destructive influence in the moral and physical world, and on the views of God in that permission; the enlightened historian may sometimes succeed, if not in penetrating into the hidden decrees of divine wisdom, yet at least in uplifting a corner of the mysterious veil which covers them. In particular phenomena of history--such for example as the destruction of a whole nation, the Jews for instance; or in the overwhelming calamities, the general miseries inflicted on a corrupt age, manifesting, clearly as they do, the retributive justice of God--calamities which, when regarded from this point of view (and it is only from this point of view they can be rightly judged), appear like a partial judgment of the world--in all such historical phenomena, a modest reference to the final causes of such events may be exceedingly appropriate. This idea of divine justice, and of God's judgments on the world exemplified in history, belongs undoubtedly to the province of historical philosophy; and, as man's resemblance to his Maker constitutes the first foundation-stone of history, this more practical principle, relating as it does, to real life and all its mighty phenomena, forms the second. But the Mystery of grace in the divine Redemption of mankind, transcends the sphere of profane history. The Christian philosophy of history must indeed tacitly pre-suppose the truth of that mystery, and assume it as known, and indeed as self-evident to all well-thinking persons--it must even, under the inspiration of this faith, refer to it very many, the greater part, indeed almost all, of the facts and phenomena of history--but it should forbear to introduce it into its own province, and should leave it to the sanctuary of religion. In the same way, whenever philosophy attempts to incorporate and rank this mystery with her own speculative conceptions, the consequence must ever be hurtful to religion; for, as philosophy thus attempts to explain and, as it were, deduce this mystery from her own speculations, the mystery of Redemption ceases to be a divine fact, and it is only as such that it is and can be the true and eternal foundation of religion. I wish here expressly to do away with an opinion which is completely unhistorical, and even subversive of all history. I cannot more truly and succintly designate this opinion, than by stating it as follows:--Christ, to say it in one word, was a Jewish Socrates; and this purest, noblest, and sublimest of all ethical teachers (according to the rationalists' interpretation of his history) met with a fate no less deplorable for mankind than that which befel the Athenian philosopher, and the wisest of all the Grecian sages.