delicate and liable to aggression, it has in England, through this royal reformer, assumed so complicated a shape that, unsolved as yet, it appears to many, judging of it in a merely human light, totally and forever incapable of solution. We must reserve to the succeeding Lecture the enumeration of all the results which flow from these premises, and this first outline of a truly Christian justice, which as such involves the principle of equity, and is even truly historical. LECTURE XIV. OF THE DIVISION OF RANKS, AND OF THE RECIPROCAL RELATIONS OF STATES ACCORDING TO THE CHRISTIAN IDEA.--OF SCIENCE AS A POWER; OF ITS CONSTITUTION, AND OF THE RIGHT REGULATION OF IT. Whenever philosophy, setting up any conceit of its own as a principle, intrudes either into the domain of religion or of politics, such an intrusion is, in every case, an aggression. And if the aggressive idea, once formed and entertained, is, nevertheless, externally and in appearance held in check and restrained--if, from ulterior considerations and for the sake of some remote object, science accommodates itself to the established system of law or religion--then is the case only so much the worse. The deep and pervading hostility of sentiment is but concealed beneath the external servility of language, and the rankling wound has but skinned over the surface. The influence of evil is far from being checked and destroyed; or, to say the least, that of good is nipped in the bud, not being allowed fully to expand itself. And at the same time the dignity of science, which can only be maintained by its independence, is fatally and irretrievably endangered. Under this conviction, I strongly protested, at the very opening of these Lectures, against all such intermeddling of philosophy with matters foreign to it; and I trust that, for my part, I have hitherto duly observed the spirit of that protest. But now, the end which philosophy strives to attain to is a right estimate and full understanding of its own nature, and that of man, both in the internal properties of his mind and in his external existence relatively to God and nature, and also to the world and society. In pursuit of this object, having once found and acknowledged the center of the inner life, such as it is given to us, and setting out therefrom, philosophy can and may, with perfect propriety, submit to investigation the highest ideas of life, and judge them after its own method, and from its own peculiar position. But still it will do this in the hope rather of explaining what actually exists, than of establishing any self-devised ideal of its own, or of setting up impracticable laws for a merely conceivable state of things under the most arbitrary assumptions--for a wholly visionary world.