Tyndal, Bolingbroke, and all the other writers against Revelation. They endeavoured to show the Gospel system as unreasonable as their extreme malice could make it, he as reasonable as his admirable wit could represent it.'

It must be recollected that in Hobbes's day, and indeed long afterwards, every one rationalised Bossuet and Bellarmine as much as Hobbes or Jeremy Taylor. Admit that all truth upon the greatest subjects of human inquiry is somehow or other to be extracted from the Bible, and, whatever may be your system, you will have to treat the Bible in the strangest way before you can 'prove' it. Hobbes adapts the Bible to his general purposes with supreme ingenuity, and a great deal of what he says is quite true, though it ought to be connected with many other truths.

Christianity embarrassed him thus: If God has established a divine society and a divine system of morality, how can the civil ruler be supreme, and how can the rules thus laid down fail to override all human laws? The principal devices by which he avoids this difficulty are the following. He admits that it is madness' to obey the civil power at the expense of damnation. What then, he asks, is necessary to salvation? He answers, two things -faith and obedience. Faith that Jesus is the Christ is what all Christian sovereigns admit in various forms, though infidel Powers deny it. Under Christian Powers, therefore, no difficulty arises. Under infidel Powers,

VOL. II

D

the precedent of Naaman, who bowed down to Rimmon but worshipped the true God in his heart, may safely be followed. As to obedience, Christianity is not a system of laws but of counsels, one of which is to obey the laws to which we are subject, which are the law of nature as interpreted by the sovereign of our country. As to the clergy, they are only advisers, and in no sense rulers. Their only power is that of excommunication, which, when you analyse it, means no more than the power of expressing disapproval.

It is easy to understand how, by the proper use of these principles, and by interpreting the language of the Bible according to his own view, Hobbes was able to give to his whole system an air of orthodoxy to which it is, on the whole, as well entitled as many other systems which have a much more orthodox reputation.

The last book, on the Kingdom of Darkness,' is an examination of the various deceptions and superstitions by which men have been ruled. Amongst these Hobbes reckons up the prerogatives of the Pope and his clergy, belief in ghosts and devils, the belief in scholastic philosophy, belief in the doctrine of eternal punishments (he urges nearly all the modified interpretations of the texts on this subject so well known in our day, and protests against the cruelty of the common doctrine), belief in Aristotle's doctrine 'that not men but law governs,' and a variety of other beliefs which he regarded as injurious.

The chapter ends with an elaborate comparison of the Papacy with the kingdom of fairies.' There is

not to be found in all English literature a stranger performance than this chapter. The most profound philosophy, the most singular shrewdness, the strangest freaks of grotesque humour, almost prophetic anticipations of the course of subsequent thought, are all connected together by a framework, the conception of which is so quaint, that there is a difficulty in understanding how it came to be written in sober earnest.

To give specimens of these characteristics would swell our article to an unconscionable length; but the following references may be worth notice. As an instance of profundity, take chapter xlvi., on Scholastic Metaphysics. Passages at pp. 677, 678 of Vol. III. of Sir W. Molesworth's edition afford an admirable specimen of humour, and of anticipation of the course of modern thought. As for shrewdness, at p. 663 there is a passage about the Romish and Pagan ceremonial which anticipates Middleton's famous tract; and as for grotesqueness, the passage about the kingdom of the fairies (697-700) might have come bodily out of the Sapientia Veterum or Fuller.

These few remarks are enough to give a sort of notion of one of the greatest of all books, and the very oddest of all great books in English literature; but nothing but careful and repeated study of the book itself can give a true conception of its magnitude, or of the richness of the 'admirable wit' which produced it.

WE have already given some account of Hobbes's Leviathan, and of his treatise on Government. We now propose to say something of his minor works, and of his general position in literature.

The dates of his long life are as follows: He was born 5th April 1588. He was educated at Magdalen Hall, at Oxford. He was a sort of secretary to Lord Bacon, for the purpose of translating his books into Latin, and he then acted as tutor in the Devonshire family, travelling with his pupils for many years on the Continent. After the Restoration he lived at Chatsworth for many years, and died at Hardwick Hall, on the borders of Nottinghamshire, 4th December 1679, aged ninety-one.

His books were published in the following order:

11. A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England.

2. Behemoth the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1660.

Translation of Thucydides, 1628; De Cive, 1640; Human Nature, 1650; De Corpore Politico, 1650; Leviathan, 1651; his mathematical and free-will controversies at various times after 1651; Behemoth, and the Dialogue of the Laws of England (after his death), in 1681.

Till the late Sir William Molesworth collected them, some years ago, there was, we believe, no complete edition of his voluminous writings. They have a sufficiently formidable look, and are calculated to deter any one but a pretty resolute student. On examination, however, this, like many other difficulties, turns out to be considerably less than it seemed at first sight. More than half of the collection is taken up either by mathematical works which no one would now care to read, or by a set of controversies with Bishop Bramhall about free-will and necessity, which are by this time a weariness to all flesh, or by translations of Homer and Thucydides. It is worth while to read half a page or so of the former translation for the sake of its strange grotesqueness and utter want of any sort of similarity to the original; but the latter is very good. It was the first of Hobbes's works, published 'to warn his countrymen against civil wars,' in 1628.

It is, we think, greatly to be regretted that translations of prose classics should be so little esteemed and read as they are at present. If they were used more freely, they would go far to dispel a superstition which exists about the classics, and would enable even scholars to get a much more correct notion of them