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and thus to reach our happiness. Then if, for any reason whatever, a rational creature of the Infinite Lord does not recognize Him, or feel its dependence on Him, or call for help in time of trouble, the end has been frustrated; it is as though there were no God at all. But people who believe in Mr. Tyndall can neither praise their Creator, nor look up to Him, nor seek the aid of His compassionate mercy. They are without God in the world. And what is still more sad, they tacitly insinuate that there cannot be any God. For, let it be true that God exists, ought He not to be able, in some way or other, to give His creatures the knowledge of Himself? How can He be satisfied to see them wandering in misery to and fro, and not give them an opening into the light? If there is a God, He must be just, holy, and gracious. He must provide for the wants of the beings He has made. An unjust God, an unknowable God, cannot be God at all. Hence, all this protesting against the accusation of positive atheism only renders the controversy more intricate; it does not restore the possibility of religion, which has been destroyed. To say that what we call the finite is really infinite and the only reality, is to be a Pantheist; to say we know the finite and the phenomenal, but can never be assured of what there is beyond it, is to take up that form of Atheism which alone is plausible in the days of enlarged physical science.

Not that, as we said before, the name makes so much difference. Our wish has been to ascertain the relative position of Christian philosophers and the thinkers of whom Mr. Tyndall has become an advocate. He can afford to be negative and critical, though the case would alter if he had to guide the poor and the sorrowing through life. But he is a complete antagonist of dogmatic religion so far as it dogmatizes, and allows himself to be an Atheist if judged by the Catholic standard. This will suffice for our purpose, which is to make sure that we are not beating the air.

VI. Mr. Tyndall's science we have collected into a doctrine at once materialistic and Hegelian. His religion, distilled from a multitude of passages, and tested by its affinities, appears as the latest form of Buddhism. Only thus has it any philosophical significance. The scepticism in all reality as distinguished from Maya, the mocking phantom of a world and of human life, the upgrowth from infinite potentiality, that gloomy absorption of the finest intellects into Nirvana which Mr. Tyndall prophesied, the morality which can dispense with God and a kingdom where justice shall finally be triumphant, these doctrines were taught in Eastern regions

before any of our modern discoveries had poured its light on the world. Nescience on the one side, morality on the other, and an emotional reverence for that ineffable mystery which surrounds us these are the elements of a very old and a very new religion. The reverence lost, our scheme becomes deficient, and the defect is broad vulgar Atheism. Nescience transcended by mystic superintellectual knowledge and morality degenerating into ceremonial, we have as near an approach to Brahminism as may exist without hereditary castes. Mr. Tyndall endeavours to preserve the mean. If he ever fails, it is by "a mingling of inconsequence," and not because he has consciously swerved from his balance.

Somewhere he has broadly stated that "matter is, at bottom, essentially mystical and transcendental." And, again, "matter is that mysterious thing by which all this has been accomplished." Indeed, the one practical result he would hope from dwelling on certain transformations is, that we shall radically change our notion of matter." Here, then, the controversy is narrowed into intelligible limits, and the first question proposes itself, "What is matter?" Next, the word "cause " has no longer with him the meaning it used to bear till it was interpreted by David Hume. Mr. Tyndall is punctilious, so far as nature will let him be, in his adherence to the new and favourite "scientific "gloss of "invariable antecedent." “ What is cause? What is force ?" are questions nearly allied, the first being generic; the second, in its modern connection, specific. Thirdly, we have seen how often the notion of change" was challenged in Mr. Tyndall's historical view of Epicurus and Darwin. Therefore, we shall do well to ask, "What is change?" Fourthly, it is the keystone of his doctrine that the original mystery of the universe is unknowable to us. This is treated in a very common chapter of scholastic questioning, "How do we know God?" Lastly, Mr. Tyndall's one instrument of clear and certain knowledge is the much celebrated (and by Hegelians of the Right somewhat despised) Vorstellung's fähigkeit, or faculty of picturepresentation. We know what is the place and the function of Vorstellung in the German philosophy, but wish Mr. Tyndall had opened his mind thereupon a little more definitely and more consecutively than he has thought of doing. But, anyhow, we shall be glad to recall the ancient Catholic theory of imagination and intellect. The question will therefore be, "What is the human intellect as contrasted with the phantasy?"

The definitions of matter in general, of force, cause, and

change, are under the jurisdiction of no special physical science. Whether we investigate sound, or light, or chemical reaction, or magnetism, these primary concepts are supposed, not acquired, in the course of such studies. They are part and parcel of our mental intuitions, and belong, in the direct order, to common reason, in the reflex order, to metaphysics. Special sciences may and do furnish examples of them, but no science of a special physical object discusses the validity of notions like matter or cause, for the simple reason that, if it did so, its own object would be speedily forgotten. If science, in the mouth of Mr. Tyndall, includes philosophy-not what they once called "Philosophical Transactions," but what Aristotle and S. Augustine and Hegel were conversant with and named by that name-then these are scientific notions, and are a proper subject for research. But if science does not include philosophy, it has no power to pass any judgment whatever on concepts which lie outside its boundary. There must be no usurpations of science, any more than of Revealed Theology.

Matter and material forces are treated in Cosmology; cause and change in Ontology; the intelligible nature of God and His relations to the universe in Natural Theology; the essence and operations of our intellect in Anthropology, Logic, and the Science of Ideas. All the answers given by Mr. Tyndall (or refused to be given) combine their influence in his theory of Religion. This belongs, of course, in the first place to conscience-not to emotion-and when analyzed in thought, reconsidered and systematized, to the science of Ethics. We congratulate Mr. Tyndall on having, in a predatory and Asiatic fashion, invaded the whole realm inhabited by abstract thinkers. It is a curious but perfectly intelligible result of employing as his only organon the picturesque imagination.

This ends the first part of our criticism. It was not possible to refute Mr. Tyndall before we had ascertained, not simply that he felt a rooted dislike to the Catholic faith and philosophy, but in what his peculiar views consisted. We have found them in close relationship to the doctrine. which, as he informs us, has descended to him from teachers of great eminence, men in the foremost ranks of European celebrity, and now drawing after them the educated and the cultured amongst Englishmen. We have examined the points as they are put before us in Mr. Tyndall, not, so far as we are conscious, diminishing aught nor aught setting down in malice. Here and there it has been necessary to make certain inferences, and to adopt class divisions. For we believe Mr. Tyndall's essays to be far from complete; and again, we do not think he means to disclaim all tradition, nor to be the single

disciple of his own school. To a Catholic, the mere account of what he holds, and the names of such as hold with him, are ample demonstration that he is really an adversary of the truths without which Faith becomes an absurdity. And even a non-Catholic, if he has not drunk at the fountains of the new philosophy, will know that the Belfast Address preaches against religion, though he may be incapable of grasping all its consequences. These indispensable preliminaries seem to be established. We can now, therefore, apply to the polemic of which they have helped to determine the nature. However, it is not easy to answer five questions without taking breath. We must deal with them after a pause, and in the pages of a future article.

ART. VII.-THE EARL OF STRAFFORD.

The Life of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. By Miss COOPER.

TE

Tinsley Brothers.

HE sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were periods when the actors of history, the men whose deeds, though every-day life to them, have furnished the romantic reading of our time, stood out in a kind of moral bas-relief. There were a greatness and an individuality about them, whether their career was for good or for evil, which we fail to find when we enter on the dull flats of the eighteenth century, with its dead level of meanness and vice. The times of Charles V., of the Spanish conquests in America, and of the battle of Pavia; the times when the naval power of Turkey was shattered at Lepanto, "when Elizabeth was England's King," when the great Armada towered in the Channel, and was strewn on the northern coasts of Europe; when Mary struggled with her rude subjects in Scotland, and Ireland nearly won her independence; the times when Europe was convulsed by the Thirty Years' War, when the grim Puritans prepared for Armageddon, and murdered their King in their stern piety; though they seem "linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes," are a region of stronger historic interest, than those which succeeded them, linked with a thousand

vices and no virtue. There were giants in those days. One of these giants was Thomas Wentworth.

He was not altogether a prepossessing giant, though far preferable to other men who held his position before and after him. He was fortiter in re, and not suaviter in modo; nor had he, particularly in the latter part of his career, very nice ideas of honour and justice when those virtues happened to be inconvenient to the King who was the object of his devotion. But in intellect and the power of his will he was gigantic.

The book before us is not a panegyric on Wentworth, as we might have expected from the frequency of modern attempts to glorify historical characters who are considered rather objectionable; but it shows in an unusually fair and candid spirit, good reason for concluding that Wentworth was not so objectionable as he is generally represented to be. It seems to us to gauge his vices and virtues with partiality. Of course, even without the name on the title-page, it would be easy to see that the book was written by a lady. Not few nor far between are instances of that want of logic and grammar which nearly always abound in feminine historical writing. Especially when she gets on the subject of the Catholic Church does the fair writer fail in English and in sequence of ideas, as indeed is not unfrequently the case even with authors and orators of the "dark sex." The earlier pages depict Wentworth in his younger days, before the resolve to serve and humour Charles I. had ruined his character. He was certainly good in his youth. His industry, kindness to his relatives, and avoidance of the dissipation to which other young Englishmen of rank were given, dispose us to look favourably on Thomas Wentworth. The pride which spoiled his good qualities developed fully only in later life. It might be thought that the feeling of reverence, which was also one of his characteristics, would have checked that other overwhelming fault; but turned into a wrong channel, and expended on a sham church and a worthless monarch, it became at last the very minister and companion of his pride, till together they hurried him to his destruction.

Statesmen of our day change their politics, though the times do not admit of changes so striking and so violent as those which marked the career of Wentworth. It is well known how his first battles were fought under the Liberal banner in the ranks with Pym and Eliot, and how he spoke for and joined in the Petition of Right with all his native ardour and thoroughness. His first public victory was won in contest with the all-powerful Buckingham. Yet the king, for

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