IN last lecture God was viewed as a Power without and above men, commanding the doing of right, and enforcing His commands with penalties—a moral Governor rendering unto every man according to his works. This conception, while not untrue, and not unworthy of separate consideration, is, as was then stated, and as must here be repeated, an imperfect, abstract, partial one, needing to be supplemented by a conception more in accordance with the modern doctrine of Divine immanence. God must be viewed not only as a Power without, but also as a Power within; as a Power working beneficently in humanity, and for humanity; working towards the ever-advancing humanisation of man through the development of the rational and moral possibilities of his nature. For such must be the goal. ‘The aim of a thing that is not merely a dead means, must lie in the thing itself.’1 If there be such a thing as progress in history, it must be towards making man answer more and more completely to the ideal of his nature and position, effectively lord and worthy to be lord of creation.

This Divine working in humanity is the natural corollary from the hypothesis that man was the aim of the creative process. If God worked towards man in the lower stages of the creative process, we expect that He will work on in man, towards adequate realisation of the human ideal. Creation, evolution will go on, now in the human sphere. If there be no trace of onward movement in history, there will be reason to suspect that we were mistaken in our whole conception of man's place in the universe, and of its significance.

But it is important to come to the study of history with rational expectations. Over-sanguine hopes inevitably react in the direction of scepticism. To this it may be due that some who see God everywhere in nature find no trace of Him in history; discovering there nothing but a dreary moral chaos, an unrelieved godless scene of sin and misery. What went ye out to see? God making men good and wise as easily, certainly, and quickly, as He makes crystals and flowers? This were unreasonable. Remember that we are now in the region of human freedom, and that we must not assert the Divine immanence, and bring into play the Divine power, so as virtually to annihilate the nature supposed to be given in man. We are also in the region of reason, and that means, as Kant long ago pointed out, that man must find out ways of doing things, slowly, by trial and error, for himself, instead of acting under the guidance of instincts which exclude at once error and progress.2 We must be prepared for mistake and misconduct on a large scale, and while still hoping for advance, we must not be surprised if it turn out to be in spirals, rather than in a straight line. Neither in the moral nor in the rational sphere can God, however willing, do everything for man. Man must be a very real and earnest fellow-worker with God. Human nature must be allowed to retain its river-like fluidity, whereby it tends to wander hither and thither at its own will; and the Divine action must be like the gentle coercion of the banks which constrain the way-ward stream to move on, though in a circuitous course, till it find its way to the sea. Such gentle coercion we may certainly count on. God, we may be sure, will not allow the river of human life to run waste. Whatever error, folly, depravity may reveal itself in human history, counteractive, corrective, redemptive Divine influence may be expected also to appear in ways possibly that shall give lovers of their kind a glad surprise.

While the world lasts, men will find in history what they bring, according to temperament and theological or philosophical bias. A Hegel will interpret events optimistically, on the principle that here, as everywhere, the real is the rational; a Lotze, losing no chance of criticising adversely the Hegelian system, will sympathise with those who think that the impression made by history is on the whole melancholy. Without indulging in strong statements, I am content to say, at the outset, that history is not a chaos without any trace of progress or rational significance; that God has not left Himself without a witness in the form of persistent beneficent activity, and that that activity has not been limited to giving rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, but has manifested itself in other and much more important ways. If this be true, as a matter of fact, then the hypothesis of a beneficent Providential order may be held as verified.

One who desires to discover the traces of such an order in history naturally bethinks himself first of that portion of history which lies before him as a completed whole in the distant past, and, within that whole, of those parts in which the lesson is most clearly taught. That means turning to the stirring pages of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman story. These certainly are of capital importance for a providential, not less than for a philosophic, view of history. But we cannot afford to leave altogether out of sight those portions of the human race which have not had an eventful, thrillingly interesting career, and to proceed on the assumption that, so far as ancient times are concerned, our view may be limited to the countries situated on the shores of the Mediterranean sea. We must remember that large sections of mankind have occupied, or now occupy, positions which may be described by the epithets: prehistoric, sub-historic, post-historic. The first applies to peoples which have had a historic career, and points to the time of obscurity antecedent to its commencement. The second refers to peoples which have not yet had a historic career, and possibly never will. The third describes the conditions of peoples who have run through their historic career, in former generations, and have passed out of day into night.

It is not impossible to take a human interest in all these three unrenowned unsung sections of our race, or to believe that they are not devoid of significance for Divine Providence. Special attraction attaches to the first class. By the nature of the case, of a prehistoric condition little can be known, but it is sometimes possible to observe a people just emerging out of the darkness of prehistoric night into the daylight of history. We can watch historic dawns. Very fair and prognostic of a notable future are some of these dawns; e.g. those of the ancient Indians, Persians, and Hebrews, and, many centuries later, of the Arabs and the Germans. A glance suffices to show us how far they have got already, and to suggest hopes of greater things to come.

Look first at the Vedic Indians, settled in the valleys of the Punjab, say fifteen hundred years before the Christian era. They are acquainted with the arts of agriculture and weaving, and with the use of metals; in possession of a highly organised language; rich in the higher treasures of the spirit: witness the collection of sacred hymns called the Rigveda, indited by Rishis who had an eye for the sublime and the beautiful in nature, and especially for the loveliness of the dawn—Ushas. The religion of these hymns is a nature-worship, but of no ignoble type, having for its psychological basis poetic sensibility, as is especially apparent in the hymns to the praise of Ushas, which touch a chord in our hearts to this day. Worship was poetry, and poetry was worship in those primitive times. Amid the polytheism of this nature-worship there is a dim feeling after a higher unity. ‘Agni is all the gods’; the many are one. The one may be pantheistically conceived, still there is a groping after the one true God if haply they may find Him. Sin, moral error, is not forgotten in these hymns, though by no means so prominent as in the Hebrew Psalter. Varuna3 is asked to pardon faults, and to assist in the struggle against evil habit; though the larger number of the prayers are for material good, illustrating the truth of the remark in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘After these things (food and raiment) do the Gentiles seek.’ Would you say that a people with all these characteristics had been left entirely to walk in their own ways, wholly unguided? Would you not rather say that God was not far from them, and that He had brought them thus far? Of what He had given they may make a wrong use, evolving out of Vedic hymns a baleful Pantheism and Brahminism. The like has happened in the history of other religions, the Hebrew and Christian not excepted; first, a God-given heavenly thing, then a woful degeneracy. But good is here if not unmixed with evil, and that no good came of it cannot be said in view of the extraordinary moral intensity of early Buddhism.

Turn your eye now to the other branch of the primitive Aryan race: the ancient Persians, with their religious poems called Gâthas, the oldest part of the Zendavesta. What do we find here, in this historic dawn of a people destined to play a prominent part in the ancient history of the world? To begin with, again an agricultural community, but that is not the remarkable feature. Most notable is a Hebrew passion for righteousness; a deep-seated conviction that righteousness is the first, supreme interest of human life. This faith forces on the ancient Zoroastrians the question: How does there come to be so much evil in the world? and gives them no rest till they discover a theory that explains the facts to their satisfaction. The theory is crude enough: a good Spirit created the good, and an evil Spirit, a sort of anti-God, created the evil. But the remarkable thing is the existence of a feeling of the need for a theory, due to an intense sense of the surpassing value of righteousness. How strange to find a people endowed with such a sense in the early morning of its historic career! Surely a Divine Educator has been at work who means good to that people and through it to the world! Even their crude theory will serve a purpose in the education of mankind. It is one way of solving a hard problem tried, found wanting, and put aside; so clearing the ground for something better. The lesson taught by a true, noble passion for righteousness, and by a false theory to support it, remains a permanent gain to the world, though both the people who taught it and their religion pass away.

Our next historic dawn is that of a people belonging to another family of nations, destined to play a not less distinguished part than the Aryans in the history of the world. This dawn, as mirrored in the pages of the Old Testament, the unique literature of the people concerned, shines with supernatural brightness. But for our purpose the supernatural light must be shaded off, and Israel must take her place alongside of other peoples, as an example of the ordinary action of a beneficent Providence in the training of races destined to greatness, before they emerge above the historical horizon. The example loses nothing by ceasing to be exceptional; for, if the light of this dawn be of the common kind, it is peculiarly intense in degree. The essential facts are these: The Beni-Israel have just escaped from Egypt, where they have sojourned for generations in a state of bondage, and they are on the way to a settled abode in Palestine under a leader called Moses. The hero of the Exodus, like Zoroaster, is a man of prophetic insight, and he is contemplating the arduous task of turning a horde of slaves into a nation of law-abiding, self-respecting men. He has two things to teach them: that God is one, and that right conduct is the prime need and interest of life. It will be hard to inculcate these high lessons, but the Egyptian experience may help him. The house of bondage was a severe school, but salutary; an excellent illustration, be it remarked in passing, of how little Providence cares about the misery men may have to endure for a while, when it is to issue eventually in moral gain. The gain was great: an inbred horror of everything Egyptian; of a universal servitude, witnessed to by those huge, overgrown cairns, the Pyramids, which could only be built where human life was cheap, labour compulsory, and the government an iron despotism. Horror also of Egyptian religion with its many gods, its beast-worship, and its dismal ideas of the life beyond the tomb. In Moses this anti-Egyptian feeling rises to a passion, and the people have been imbued with it to a certain extent; therefore the heroic task of making them a nation of freemen and of ethical Monotheists is by no means hopeless. What a splendid testimony to the reality of a beneficent providential order steadily pursuing the higher development of mankind! The tongue of this people is peculiar, a remarkable product of the language-making faculty of man; but its moral temper is even more distinctive. And this intense dawn came early in the day, fifteen hundred years before our era. Some have doubted the existence of ethical monotheism, even in rudimentary form, at so early a period in Israel's history, and have even gone so far as to question the existence of Moses. But, if there was a Zoroaster why not a Moses? and if the Gâthas go back to the twelfth or fifteenth century before Christ, why not the Decalogue writ in lapidary style?

Our next dawn carries us forward some two thousand years. It is that of a people kindred to the Hebrews in race and tongue, possibly as old, but remaining in obscurity all that time, and then suddenly appearing above the horizon. I mean the Arabians, whose emergence into the light of history took place in connection with the religious movement inaugurated by Mohammed. They were a people of great qualities and possibilities, ‘unconsciously waiting,’ as Carlyle remarks, ‘for the clay when they should become notable to all the world.’4 There is the fuel for a great fire in their nature, and as the fuel has never yet been used up, it is all there ready to be kindled when the hour of Providence and the man come. They live in a land blessed with a fine, bracing climate, fitted to foster vigorous health and high elastic animal spirits: the sky ever clear, the air pure and strengthening; the air of a sandy desert more vivifying, says Sprenger, himself a Swiss, than the air of the Alps and of the Himalaya.5 The temperament of this people is full of poetry and passion. There are poetic contests in which the best poets of the different tribes take part, and the poem that wins the prize is suspended by the gate of the Kaaba, visible to all who enter. The passionate nature finds its outlet in perpetual tribal feuds. A wild, restless people, capable of a great career, if only a man should arise to lead them, and a great enthusiasm were to take possession of them, knitting them together by a common purpose and calling into play all their latent powers. Mohammed was the man, and his heart-stirring watch-word, Islam: submission to Allah Akbar, the one great God, the word that made their wild hearts burn.

Some think that this dawn ushered in a day which was an unmitigated curse and disaster to the world; not an illustration of a beneficent Providence caring for the higher interests of mankind, rather a mystery sorely trying faith. This to me is not easily credible. I sympathise with those who, like Carlyle and Maurice,6 have tried to show that Mohammedanism is not an unmixed evil, and that it owed its remarkable success, not principally to any of the causes that before their time were much insisted on: not to force of arms, or the credulity of human nature, prone to embrace any plausible imposture, or to plagiarism from the Old and New Testaments, but before all things to the presence of positive and important truth earnestly believed. Mohammed's own religion, in its inception, was a genuine enthusiasm against idols as naught, and for the essential truth that one God is, and that He is the rewarder of those that obey Him and serve Him. It was a religious reform conferring a real boon, in the first place on his own countrymen, morally as well as otherwise. Both in religion and in morals, the Arabians before Mohammed arose were in a very degenerate state. Their religion seems to have been a combination of star-worship and fetichism. Among the objects of worship were stones, trees, shapeless masses of dough, also certain female divinities called the daughters of God. The most famous object of worship was the Black Stone, kept in the temple at Mecca, called the Kaaba, of very ancient date and fame, built in the shape of a cube, and forming, as Bosworth Smith says, ‘a veritable Pantheon of all Arabia.’7 The morals of the people were low. Drunkenness was prevalent; gambling was indulged in, to the extent of staking even personal freedom; the revolting practice of burying alive female children was not uncommon; women were held in no respect, and polygamy was practised to an unlimited extent. In both respects reform was urgently needed, and the best men in Arabia had for some time been longing for the advent of a prophet. The prophet at length came, saying with a voice thrilling with conviction, ‘The idols in the Kaaba are nought,’ and denouncing with vehement earnestness prevalent evil practices; and after much initial opposition his message was listened to as the word of the one living, true God. Thus Mohammed did for the sons of Ishmael what Moses did for the children of Israel. Mohammedanism may indeed be called an Arabian Judaism.

The larger question, to what extent the religion of Mohammed has been a blessing to the nations which it overran in its career of military conquest, or to the peoples whom in more recent times it has converted by the more Christian method of missionary propagandism, is less easily answered. Some have laid down the broad position that in no case has Mohammedanism gained, or at least, held ground, where it did not bring something better than it found. Those who hold this view admit that, if Mohammedans had succeeded in conquering the most civilised races of the world and the Christian nations of the west, it would have been a calamity. But they contend that the religion which took its origin in Arabia, in the sixth century of our era, has done good to the peoples among whom it has taken a permanent hold in Asia and Africa; that it has indeed done for these peoples what it did for the Arabians: made them better than it found them, elevated their religious ideas, and improved their morals, if it has not set before them the highest moral ideal.8 This is a question to be settled by careful, dispassionate investigation, not by prejudice. It is not inconceivable that in the purpose of Providence the Mohammedan religion might be intended in some parts of the world to prepare the way for something better than itself. Providence does not usually give the best at once. It gives what men can receive: the relatively good as a step towards the better, and the better as a step towards the best. On this method it proceeded in the case of Israel, why not also in other cases such as that now under consideration?

One thing, however, is certain. Islamism can make no rightful claim to finality. Wherever it is confronted with Christianity, worthily represented, it ought to bow to its superior worth. A religion which proclaims one Sovereign God is a great improvement on idolatry, but it should give way to a religion which gives to men not merely a Divine Sovereign ruling over them as slaves, but a Father who regards them as His children. A religion which restricts the number of wives to four is an improvement on unlimited polygamy; but even restricted polygamy is a barbarism compared with the Christian ideal of monogamy. Once more, a religion which enjoins on slave-owners to be kind to their slaves, is an improvement on a state of society in which the slave is unprotected by the law, and left at the mercy of a master; but no religion can be final which does not so conceive the dignity of man as to make slavery appear essentially evil and inadmissible. In all these respects Islamism comes short, therefore its right of existence, in the view of the providential order, can only be temporary. Mohammedans, however, are not willing to accept this humble position. They have no thought of giving way to a better, no idea that there is anything better to give way to. In this they are at fault, but they do not stand alone. The Jews made the same mistake; adherents of all religions are prone to it. It is always hard to look steadfastly to the end of a religion, long-established, but ripe for abolition.

One more historic dawn offers itself to our view, the last to be named, but not the least fair or prophetic. It is that of the ancient Germans, who appeared above the horizon shortly after the commencement of the Christian era. They have the good fortune to be introduced to our notice by one of the ablest and most candid of Roman historians, Tacitus, in whose pages the character of those Northern barbarians suffers no harm; possibly it is even too favourably exhibited, for the writer is dissatisfied with the manners of Rome, and uses those of the Germans as an instrument of rebuke. In the little book on the Position, Manners, and Peoples of Germany,9 written about the end of the first century, the people who were destined to break up the Roman empire appear in a very attractive light. The men have blue piercing eyes, red hair, large bodies. They are brave; to leave a shield on the field of battle is accounted an indelible disgrace. They love liberty. They choose their kings for their nobility, their leaders for their valour. Their kings are not despots with unlimited power; all matters of great importance must be brought for discussion and final decision before the assembly of the people. Their captains lead by example rather than by authority; swift in decision, well in view, in the van, they command admiration. They are given to hospitality, making no distinction between friend and stranger. They are self-restrained; they do not lament lost friends, they remember them. They are romantic; they do not live together in towns, they till the land apart, and each in his own way, as fountain, plain, or grove takes the fancy. They love song, by which they give expression to their religious faith and celebrate dead heroes and memorable exploits. The women are as brave as the men, and sometimes fight along with them. They are greatly respected by the men, who see in them something holy, and credit them with the gift of foretelling. The relations between the sexes are chaste and pure. Monogamy prevails. Adultery is rare, and is rigorously punished; vice is abhorred, not laughed at. Good morals have more authority there than elsewhere good laws.

Verily a beautiful dawn, full of promise for the future! How shallow the notion that these barbarians were of no account in the moral order of the world, because up till the moment when they attracted the attention of Roman rulers and writers they were unknown to fame! Manifestly a beneficent Providence has been preparing this people through silent centuries for historic service and renown. They might have become distinguished centuries earlier, but they had to wait for their opportunity. They had to wait long for their hour. For they are an old people. They belong to the Aryan stock, and their language is kindred to that of the Vedic Indians. Common words point to a common origin and a common home in a far past time, say two thousand years before the Christian era. They have wandered from the East to the forests of Germany in the course of the ages, and here they are, ready for the work assigned to them, with sterling virtues already acquired, and with aptitudes for learning more. If such a people never had their opportunity, one's faith in Providence might be shaken, for it would signify an excellent instrument wasted. But the instrument is ready, and the time for use has come; and in both, and in the correspondence between them, a beneficent providential order is apparent.

These five dawns are all instructive as to the significance in the providential order of the prehistoric life of nations. The last two, from the lateness of their dates, are specially instructive as tending to throw light on the destinies of such portions of the human race as may seem fated to abide permanently in the obscurity of the sub-historic condition. Our thoughts here naturally turn to Africa—that vast, populous, dark continent which has hitherto contributed so little to the higher life of man; the main distinction of its people being fertility, vigour in the purely animal function of multiplying and replenishing the earth. Carthage and Egypt can hardly be reckoned exceptions. Carthage rose like a great comet in the historic firmament, in its deadly struggle with Rome, under its renowned general, Hannibal. Its armies fought splendidly, but it was well that they were beaten. For Carthage belonged to the bad stock of the Pagan Semites whose religion was a revolting combination of cruelty and lust, human sacrifice and sacred prostitution. My charity is not equal to thinking well of that infamous cult. I am unable to invent apologies for Baal-worship. It was unspeakably vile, corrupt, and corrupting, and the one conceivable function of Providence in relation to it is that of asserting against it a judicial moral order, and providing for its destruction. The destroyer in the case of the Canaanites was Israel, in the case of Carthage, Rome. The motives in either case might be far from perfect, but at least, in the hands of Rome, the execution was thorough. Carthage was destroyed, and her memory obliterated.

The feeling awakened by the monumental story of ancient Egypt is one of perplexed interest. The religion of that land has been well called the religion of mystery. Everything connected with it is mysterious, and as such at once repulsive and fascinating. Its sculpture, as combining adherence to proportion in form with a lack of personal expression, especially in the statues of the gods, where the features are stereotyped—noble, but without individuality; its hieroglyphic, which fascinates by the consciousness that mind produced the signs and embodied thought therein, yet repels by the opaque veil which hides the thought from view; its embalming of the dead, which bears testimony to a belief in the life beyond, that touches a sympathetic chord in our hearts, yet repels by the ghastly, vain struggle against the law of corruption exhibited in the mummy.

The Egyptians lived in a perpetual twilight. Properly speaking, they were a people of the pre-historic type, of whom we ought not to have known anything, and of whom we do know somewhat owing to the accident of their coming into contact with historic peoples, and to the recent unearthing of their funereal monuments. Bunsen pronounces them an antediluvian people, and sees in their language and traditions, as revealed in the hieroglyphic records, ‘a deposit left by that period which we call the primeval world.’10 From this point of view, we can judge them more justly, and feel more kindly towards them. We arc no longer surprised at the inconsequences, incongruities, and even monstrosities in their religion, which make theorising about it impossible, and compel you to be content to state facts, without pretending to understand. It is the religion of children, and that is enough.11 Far from being surprised or shocked, you rather wonder that, amid all the crudity and unreason, there is so much that is wise and morally sound in the religious consciousness of this survival of primeval humanity. The judgment of the dead reveals a knowledge of duty which constrains the admission that God was not far from this quaint old-world people, and suggests the inference that the same thing holds true of all prehistoric peoples. That is the chief lesson to be learned from the monuments, and the teaching of that lesson by the inscriptions in her tombs is the one service rendered by ancient Egypt to the providential history of mankind; unless we reckon as another that, by being a hard taskmaster to Israel, she produced in the minds of her bonds-men a religious reaction destined to be very fruitful in consequences. That a reaction or reform in the direction of a more rational religion should ever take place within herself was not to be expected, for the souls of the Egyptians, during their lifetime, were embalmed in the cerements of stereotyped religious custom as completely as their bodies were mummified after death.

Returning from these far-past times to the present, the question may be asked, Is there any likelihood of the dark races of Africa, or of any one of them, becoming an elect instrument in the hands of Providence for signal service to the higher interests of mankind on that continent? At this late era the presumption is in favour of the negative. And yet the fact that the Germans and the Arabs had to wait so long for their opportunity ought to put us on our guard against too confident dogmatism. Doubtless it is not a question of opportunity merely. Endowment has to be considered; even climate. Extremes of heat and cold are not favourable to the development of intellectual and moral energy. The temperate zones, lying between the tropics and the Arctic regions, have been the home of the races which have made their mark in history. Still, Africa is a vast continent stretching from 35° north to 35° south latitude, and it is far from impossible that some of the peoples occupying its healthiest and most bracing tracts of country may waken up to a new life under the stimulating influence of a new social environment. One thing seems certain: that a dawn has already come to Africa, giving promise of a brighter future, if not in the sense of a great career in commerce, literature, or political power, at least in the sense of enjoying to a considerable degree the benefits which European civilisation can bestow. The eyes of all Europe are now turned to the dark continent. Travellers have penetrated to its remotest recesses, so that it is no longer an unknown land. Heroic explorers of the type of Livingstone and Thomson have invested it with a romantic interest, and awakened in devout hearts the hope that their devoted efforts are the promise and pledge of a beneficent providential purpose. The colonising energy of Britain has struck root in its soil, destined to bear fruit, mainly, we may hope, if not wholly good. These things are not unworthy of notice in a study of the providential order of the world. Neither a priori theory nor experience justifies the notion that, if there be a Providence at all, it must take the form of making all peoples renowned. Some are fitted to give and some to receive benefit; some to achieve results of which history will take note, and some to play the humbler part of participating in the good effects of their achievements. Peoples who are in the latter position cannot be said to be neglected by the Divine Father of mankind.

This observation facilitates transition to the last topic that falls to be mentioned in the present connection, viz., the position of those peoples whose historic dawn and day are long past, and who are now in the post-historic stage of their existence. The Jews and the modern Greeks supply illustrative instances. Must we think of them as simply reprobate, or as human refuse in which the moral order of the world takes no further interest? By no means. God does not despise them, neither ought we. Doubtless their glory is departed, their appropriate motto is fuimus; the races they belong to have seen better days. But what then? They have simply stepped down from the exalted position of those who do signal service to mankind to the lowlier position of those who are served. Whether any people that has undergone this change of fortune can regain the higher position is a question on which it is not necessary to dogmatise. Perhaps the chief obstacles to resurrection are demoralising self-contempt, and unbelief in the possibility of national rejuvenescence prevalent in society. There is no irreversible decree of heaven standing in the way. St. Paul believed that God was not done with Israel. What precisely he expected we do not fully know. He could not, of course, expect Israel to repeat her past history, and do a second time what she had done before. The Jewish people continues to produce great men: some of the most distinguished men of modern times, in various European countries, and in different spheres of life, have belonged to that race. But it can hardly give to the world a new succession of Hebrew prophets; still less can it give us a second Christ. It may, however, learn to appreciate better the one Christ it has given, and that surely would be for its good. That, I think, was what St. Paul chiefly desired and hoped for. May we not hope for it also? How the desirable result is to be brought about is a problem. Possibly not to any great extent by express efforts at conversion by church missions; perhaps rather by the indirect, undesigned influence of the sincere reverence of Christendom for the author of the Christian faith, backed by wiser second thoughts of Israel's sons left to their own reflections.

In any case, it remains true that God has not cast away this ancient elect people. Providence casts away utterly no elect people. There is an Israel, a Greece, an Italy still. They are not what they were, but who can tell what they may become? Meantime they have a share in that goodness of God which is unto all, and in those tender mercies which are over all His works.

• 1.

  Kelly, Evolution and Effort, pp. 103, 104.

• 2.

  Kant remarks: ‘It is the will of nature, that in all that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence man should depend on himself, and become partaker of no other happiness or completeness than that which he procures for himself without the aid of instinct by his own reason.’ He comments on this thesis to the effect that nature is parsimonious in the use of means, therefore having given man reason she leaves him to work his way with that, discovering for himself means of clothing and defence (without horns or claws like oxen and lions) as well as performing the higher functions of enriching life with enjoyments and developing his own character. Vide his essay entitled ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Ansicht,’ Werke (Hardenstein) vol. iv, p. 143.

• 3.

  The hymns which refer to moral faults are mainly addressed to Varuna.

• 4.

  Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 223.

• 5.

  Life of Mohammed.

• 6.

  Religions of the world; Boyle Lectures for 1847.

• 7.

  Mohammed and Mohammedans, p. 102.

• 8.

  This is the view of Bosworth Smith, vide Mohammed and Mohammedans, p. 286.

• 9.

  De Situ, Moribus, et Populis Germaniae.

• 10.

  God in History, vol. i. p. 226.

• 11.

  There in truth in the remark of Herder that the ancient Egyptians were children in thought because they were children in the expression of thought.—Ideen, vol. iii. p. 121.