this opinion as an instance of the second class, namely, of fractional truths integrated by fancy, passion, accident, and that preponderance of the positive over the negative in the memory, which makes it no less tenacious of coincidences than forgetful of failures. Still I should not fear to be its advocate under the following limitation: non nisi de rebus divinis datur divinatio.

to the author of Waverley, Guy Mannering, &c. How (asked Ulysses, addressing his guardian goddess) shall I be able to recognize Proteus in the swallow that skims round our houses whom I have been accustomed to behold as a swan of Phoebus, measuring his movements to a celestial music? In both alike, she replied, thou canst recognize the god.

So supported, I dare avow that I have thought my translation worthy of a more favorable reception from the public and its literary guides and purveyors. But when I recollect that a much better and very far more valuable work, Mr. Cary's incomparable translation of Dante, had very nearly met with the same fate, I lose all right, and I trust, all inclination, to complain;—an inclination, which the mere sense of its folly and uselessness will not always suffice to preclude. (1817.-Ed.)

COUNTESS. What dost thou not believe, that oft in dreams A voice of warning speaks prophetic to us?

WALLENSTEIN. There is no doubt that there exist such voices;

Yet I would not call them

Voices of warning, that announce to us
Only the inevitable. As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,

I am indeed firmly persuaded, that no doctrine was ever widely diffused among various nations through successive ages, and under different religions (such, for instance, as the tenets of original sin and of redemption, those fundamental articles of every known religion professing to have been revealed), which is not founded either in the nature of things, or in the necessities of human nature. Nay, the more strange and irreconcileable such a doctrine may appear to the understanding, the judgments of which are grounded on general rules abstracted from the world of the senses, the stronger is the presumption in its favor. For whatever satirists may say, or sciolists imagine, the human mind has no predilection for absurdity. I would even extend the principle (proportionately I mean) to sundry tenets, that from their strangeness or

And in to-day already walks to-morrow.
That which we read of the Fourth Henry's death
Did ever vex and haunt me, like a tale
Of my own future destiny. The king
Felt in his breast the phantom of the knife,
Long ere Ravaillac arm'd himself therewith.
His quiet mind forsook him: the phantasma
Started him in his Louvre, chas'd him forth
Into the open air. Like funeral knells
Sounded that coronation festival;

And still with boding sense he heard the tread
Of those feet, that even then were seeking him
Throughout the streets of Paris.

VOL. III.

Death of Wallenstein, act v. sc. i.

Poet. Works. III. p. 308.

G

dangerous tendency appear only to be generally reprobated, as eclipses in the belief of barbarous tribes are to be frightened away by noises and execrations; but which rather resemble the luminary itself in this one respect, that after a longer or shorter interval of occultation, they are still found to re-emerge. It is these, the re-appearance of which (nomine tantum mutato) from age to age gives to ecclesiastical history a deeper interest than that of romance and scarcely less wild for every philosophic mind. I am far from asserting that such a doctrine (the Antinomian, for instance, or that of a latent mystical sense in the words of Scripture and the works of nature, according to Origen and Emanuel Swedenborg) shall be always the best possible, or not a distorted and dangerous, as well as partial, representation of the truth on which it is founded. For the same body casts strangely different shadows in different positions and different degrees of light. But I dare, and do, affirm that it always does shadow out some important truth, and from it derives its main influence over the faith of its adherents, obscure as their perception of this truth may be, and though they may themselves attribute their belief to the supernatural gifts of the founder, or the miracles by which his preaching had been accredited. See Wesley's Journal for proofs. But we have the highest possible authority, that of Scripture itself, to justify us in putting the question,—whether

miracles can, of themselves, work a true conviction in the mind. There are spiritual truths which must derive their evidence from within, which whoever rejects, neither will he believe though a man were to rise from the dead to confirm them. And under the Mosaic law a miracle in attestation of a false doctrine subjected the miracle-worker to death; and whether the miracle was really or only seemingly supernatural, makes no difference in the present argument, its power of convincing, whatever that power may be, whether great or small, depending on the fulness of the belief in its miraculous nature. Est quibus esse videtur. Or rather, that I may express the same position in a form less likely to offend, is not a true efficient conviction of a moral truth, is not the creating of a new heart, which collects the energies of a man's whole being in the focus of the conscience, the one essential miracle, the same and of the same evidence to the ignorant and the learned, which no superior skill can counterfeit, human or demoniacal? Is it not emphatically that leading of the Father, without which no man can come to Christ? Is it not that implication of doctrine in the miracle and of miracle in the doctrine, which is the bridge of communication between the senses and the soul; -that predisposing warmth which renders the understanding susceptible of the specific impression from the historic, and from all other outward, seals of testimony? Is not this the one infallible crite

rion of miracles, by which a man can know whether they be of God? The abhorrence in which the most savage or barbarous tribes hold witchcraft, in which however their belief is so intense* as even to control the springs of life,—is not this abhorrence of witchcraft under so full a conviction of its reality a proof, how little of divine, how little fitting to our nature, a miracle is, when insulated from spiritual truths, and disconnected from religion as its end? What then can we think of a theological theory, which adopting a scheme of prudential legality, common to it with "the sty of Epicurus," as far at least as the springs of moral action are concerned, makes its whole religion consist in the belief of miracles! As well might the poor African prepare for himself a fetisch by plucking out the eyes from the eagle or the lynx, and enshrining the same, worship in them the power of vision. As the tenet of professed Christians (I speak of the principle not of the men, whose hearts will always more or less correct the errors of their understandings) it is even more absurd, and the pretext for such a religion more inconsistent than the religion itself. For they profess to derive from it their whole faith in that futurity, which if they had not

* I refer the reader to Hearne's Travels among the Copper Indians, and to Bryan Edwards's account of the Oby in the West Indies, grounded on judicial documents and personal observation.