stated shortly, because the greater part of the books in which it is contained are occupied with matter which is now pretty nearly obsolete. We will make one general observation upon it.

It is very common to assert that whether the Roman Catholic view as put forward by Bossuet— and no one ever put it forward with equal power or plausibility-be true or false, it is at least thoroughly logical, and far superior to the half-meanings, subterfuges, and inconsistencies of Protestant writers. In short, Dryden's famous lines, To take up half on faith and half to try,' express, in a few words, the criticism which people who like to dispose of large subjects in a compressed succinct way have generally made upon such writings. Surely, however, when the matter is fairly considered, this is an entire fallacy.

A very short answer may be given to the whole of Bossuet's argument. The Protestants might have replied to him, 'All that you say is, that upon our principles we ought to be Socinians, or Deists, or Atheists if you please, if their views are supported by stronger arguments and better evidence than ours. This we admit, and so must every one else who is not prepared to give some other reason for believing in his creed than that it is true, and to give some other test of truth than reason and evidence. Authority is only another name for evidence. If God himself asserted a fact, such an assertion would not be evidence of the fact addressed to the reason of the

person to whom the assertion was made, unless truth were assumed or proved to be an attribute of God. Take, therefore, the highest possible view of Church authority, and you never alter the case. Judges, as Chillingworth unanswerably says we all must be, the Protestant judges that this is the road, and the Catholic that this is the guide who knows the road.'

In a word, Bossuet's whole argument is either an appeal to reason as to the infallibility of the Churchwhich is just as much an appeal to reason as if the issue were as to the truth of the doctrines of the Church or else it is a passionate exhortation to keep your eyes shut as tight as possible, because, if you once open them, you will see what you do not like. Believe all this without inquiry, because perhaps inquiry will prove that it is false.

If Bossuet did not mean to say that the Socinian and the Deist could out-argue the Lutheran and Calvinist, his argument is pointless. If he did, it proves that their views are true, for he uses no arguments at all against them which are not open to the Protestant as well. His sole argument on behalf of Church authority may be thus expressed: There must be an infallible Church, for if there is none, who is to put down the Socinians? which is no argument against Focinians, and not an honest argument against the orthodox Protestants. Jurieu might have retorted. Conclusively upon Bossuet by asking how he proposed to deal with the Socinians? He might of course burn but, if he had to answer them, he must do so

upon some other principle than that of Church authority, which they denied; and whatever other answer he found would be available to Protestants as well as to himself.

Perhaps the most obvious remark on Bossuet as a controversialist is that he was, beyond all question, the forerunner of Voltaire. As Lord Macaulay well observed, you have only to join the proposition that transubstantiation is nonsense to the proposition that it is an essential doctrine of Christianity, and you obtain an obvious inference. It is very remarkable, and strongly characteristic of the rash, heated, vehement temper of the man and of his nation, that he should not have appreciated the tremendous risk to which he was exposing his creed by the way in which he stated it. Notwithstanding all his predictions, England, at the end of the century of which Bossuet saw the beginning, was far more orthodox than France, and English theologians made an incomparably better fight against the Deists in the eighteenth century, than was made by the Roman Catholics. It would be difficult to find amongst the French writers of the eighteenth century Christian apologists who could be compared in power or in influence to the line of writers of whom Tillotson and Horsley mark the two extremities.

VII

LOCKE'S ESSAY ON THE HUMAN

UNDERSTANDING1

IT may reasonably be doubted whether any writer on philosophical subjects ever produced such a broad, solid effect on the minds of the English people as Locke. Nor do we think that his influence has been or will be much diminished, although no one has ever produced a more vigorous reaction against his teaching. Read the Essay on the Human Understanding, and you will be continually under the impression that you are reading the commonplaces of all contemporary literature reduced to a philosophical shape. Read the Essay on Civil Government or the Letters on Toleration, and the same reflection continually presents itself—this is the doctrine which I have heard all my life, on which people all round me are continually acting, and against which more aspiring forms of philosophy are only protests which

1 An Essay concerning Human Understanding. By John Locke, Gent.

have not as yet succeeded, and do not seem likely to succeed, in reaching the minds of the great body of people who think about philosophy.

There is, indeed, no one of the great departments of life in which Locke has not exercised, and does not to this day exercise, a degree of influence which is perhaps, in itself, the strongest evidence supplied by the history of modern speculation, of the practical importance of philosophical inquiries. Hardly any writer, too, has been made the subject of so much comment of the controversial kind. Reid, Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, De Maistre, M. Victor Cousin and many others - almost every one, in a word, who has believed in any of the various forms of idealism which have succeeded each other for the last century or more in England, Germany, and France has criticised Locke, with more or less dissent, and more or less justice to his great qualities.

He has, indeed, been made the centre of so extensive a literature that a man who forms his opinion of him from reading his books for himself can hardly fail to be conscious of a certain presumption. It seems too coarse and blunt a way of making acquaintance with books about which so much has been said. Still it is difficult not to feel that the question which the Count in the Soirées de St. Petersburg asks of his interlocutor, before they go into the subject of Locke, 'l'avez vous lu?' might be not altogether superfluous with respect to many