THE DIVINE FOOTSTEPS IN HUMAN HISTORY.*
THE anonymous writer of this handsome volume belongs to a class which, as publishing becomes more and more a habit to all who believe they can think, will, we suspect, increase. Judging from internal evidence, we should imagine him a Scotch clergyman of small power, and a limited range of knowledge, who has studied a subject too wide for his grasp, till it has extinguished the slender judgment he may originally have possessed. We do not otherwise see how to ac- oount for a man, who must have some education, or he could never have prepared this mass of historic reflections, and some means, or he could never have beguiled Messrs. Blackwood into so hopeless an enterprise as publishing his belief that Ezekiel foreshadowed the Free Church of Scotland. The frame of the building which the prophet saw was human history, the "reed of six cubits" by which he measured was a term of six hundred years, the little chambers are cycles of time, the "breadth, which was eastward and northwarVforetels the diffusion of Christianity from Judea to Scotland, the "north gate" always implying that country. The "face of the inner porch" means, on this system, "the commencement of the twelve years' national misery and humilia- tion to England consequent upon the Danish invasion of the year A.D. 991!" The "length of the north gate in the outward court" signifies "the space of time that was to elapse before the entrance to the inner court of ecclesiastical reformation and regeneration would be reached in Great Britain by way of Scotland." Sarah and Isaac are allegorical expressions for the Established Church of England and dissent, and "the two tables on this side" are "for the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, these being nearest a state of ecclesiastical per- fection," and so on for scores of pages. History is made up of "chambers," and is confined to Judea, and Rome, and Britain, and through its course the reed of six hundred years measures the chambers, and the fall of the Bourbons is part of one chamber which began in The Divine Footsteps in Human History. Messrs. Blackwood and Son.
Israel, and so the "argument for the existence of the I am that I am,' becomes inexpressibly stronger."
We should not have noticed this carious rubbish but that the book is after all only the reductio ad absurdum of a particular system
of thought, as visible, for example, in the writings of Sir A. Alison as in those of this feeble enthusiast. His main theory is one which un- consciously influences half the Christian world, a specimen of posteriori reasoning which we have read over and over again in works not disfigured by crack-brained interpretations of a mystical mission. No man who believes in a God at all can doubt that he regulates either by immutable laws, or, as we hold, by direct guidance, the whole course of human history, educating his creatures, as it were, towards some end not yet revealed. But the school on which men, like this author, bring disrepute, attempt to establish the converse of that pro- position, and try from the order which they think they have observed among human events to educe the existence of a guiding Hand. The usual theory as employed by men a little more intelligent than the author of Footsteps of God in Human History seems to be some- thing in this wise. If God governs as well as reigns, if He is inces- santly directing the hearts and actions of men towards some predestined goal, there must be in human affairs a certain symmetrical progress, a persistent tendency towards the development of man into his full stature and powers. Humanity must be growing, as all beings with life do obviously grow, and the theory culminates in Dr. Temple's beautiful but very antique hypothesis of the unvierse being but one grand man. Such a tendency these writers find, or think they find, in the history of Europe. For nearly three thousand years, they argue that the history of man—for to an Englishman or German the denizens of his own quarter are always the human race—has been one of advance, always fitful, often broken by terrible periods of disaster and reflux, but still, on the whole, perceptible to human eyes, and capable of more or less eloquent description. The ancient empires prepared the ground for Rome, and Rome paved the way for Christ, whose worship gradually influencing all hearts, and penetrating all human arrangements, has since rendered progress far more rapid and visible. It has not yet ended, nor can the end be divined, but the progress being so manifest and so clearly beyond the power of man to affect, is of itself a proof of divine guidance, and therefore of the exist- ence of the Guide.
The syllogism is false, though it has brought such comfort to minds always searching for those external proofs of the Divine existence, which ought to be perfect within themselves, that we have some hesi- tating in employing the crucible in which it must melt. We also believe in Divine guidance ; and accepting that as a certainty we also can trust in humble faith that He leads the nations by a mysterious path towards some more perfect future, that the great work, bits and frag- ments of which we can see, is really a perfect whole, and that God being good, its end is the realizationof that design which, as it was the design of the Creator, must in its essence comprise perfection. But that any such law is actually visible in history we must, perforce, deny, for the history of man is not visibly a history of progress. The Roman world is not the world for which Christ died, nor are we, the men of white skins and steam engines, who think that because we have discovered the telegraph we are therefore nearer to God, the sum and conclusion of humanity. Even in Europe large sections of men have never advanced a step. It is very doubtful whether the masses of Italy, France, and England are one whit nobler or better or more intelligent than they were under the Roman empire. They have, indeed, made one great stride by receiving a nominal Christianity, and with it the possibility of an infinite ad- vance, but the seed has as yet lain almost wholly infructuous. Millions of men over Europe live like the beasts that perish, with no higher aim or enjoyments, or operating sense of right. The moment the thin crust of civilization, or the thinner bond of social control is broken, they appear, as for instance in the sack of a city, in their true light as savages, owing no responsibility to Heaven, and unsoftened by all the influences which in a thousand years have become strong enough to improve the educated million. In Asia the picture is even worse. No man reasonably well acquainted with facts can doubt that the nations of Asia have, on the whole, retrograded or stood still, that the Chinese are worse than they were when they produced Confucius, that the Hindoos have lost the moral sense which induced them to accept the laws of Munoo, that over Western Asia the flame of Chris- tianity which once burned so clear, has flickered down till the re- maining light is less perceptible than the noxious effluvium. Where is the progress here, or in Africa, where, if there ever existed a greater race, it has sunk into savagery, or if there did not, there has been no progress at all ; or in Australia, where the commencement of civiliza- tion means also the end of the race, or in Polynesia, where humanity actually dies oiit just as the prospect gladdens men's souls, that the dwellers in those island Edens may be regenerated by accepting the faith of Christ? Sir A. Alison and many an English divine would say that these results imply punishment : that men who have stifled the divine life within themselves are left to their own devices. It may be so, but then the theory of visible progress as applied to the whole world, must be at once given up. Nor can we see any foundation in reason for a theory which implies that God punishes the Tartars of China for rejecting light, while he gave to the Tartars of Russia the means of receiving it, which condemns the savages of Australia to extinction, while it leaves to the savages of Congo the chance and the probability of almost infinite progress. Whether New Zealanders become Christians or not they will perish, but the slaves imported from Guinea, once fairly under the operation of Christian laws, may have an indefinitely grand career. That men Can perceive and acknowledge a Divine influence visibly operative in isolated acts we heartily admit. If events like the regeneration of Italy —events confounding all human wisdom—can take place with- out it, then is secularism the only reliable creed, but that we perceive the sequence of these events we utterly deny. The road is too vast and our eyes too feeble. The astronomer can sea one little group of existences which he calls a universe, and can trace out a law, or the simulacrum of a law, which guides or appears to guide them. But there exist congregations of worlds which, though he can perceive them, seem to him to be under no law, which are in fact anomalies, things disproving the guidance he thinks he has traced out. The astronomer, dwelling always amidst the works with which man. can have nothing to do, is usually humble, but the historian is only too apt to devise the law he cannot discover, to attribute with Buckle all events to natural causes, or with the author before us, to suppose that Ezekiel foresaw the disruption of a petty ecclesiastical establishment on a point which has no conceivable bearing on the salvation even of 13ixrtch mankind. God governs as well as reigns, but to attempt to explain history bye law not revealed. by Him, but attributed to Him, which may be in its essence true, but which is at variance with half the known facts, is pure empiricism_ To explain God, which is what these men try to do, from the infinitesimal morsel of time which we call human history, is to lay down a statistical law from the truths we find in a village. They are almost invariably wrong, lead in one by an inevitable deduction to the extinction of villagers, in another to an overplus which must eat up the inhabitants. The broad. law is true for all that, and the aberrations of the village only serve to correct other aberrations which would dimi- nish or impair absolute perfection. Could we rise to the point at which we could grasp the whole of a plan which. in its nature must be inffnite, we might perceive the relation the unmeaning or appa, rently evil facts bear to the general scheme ; but till then, we are something like ants, who, because the flints are uneven, think the building can never be constructed.
We may be told that the belief entertained by such men as the author of Divine Footsteps in Human History does, after all, no harm; that the man who finds progress the law of history will but advance the more eagerly. Very possibly; and the man who does not find it there, -what willhe do ? Sink down in abject despair, or pronounce, finally, that there is no truth whatever„ except that sugar is sweet. That is what the better-class Roman did under the Empire; what the Parisian is to-day doing; what thousands of Englishmen would but for the progress in England be to-day tempted. to do. Every instance of re, trogression under that theory saddens the human heart and tends to paralyze human energy; and the first necessity for man is to cling to a faith which can believe that even.retrogression may be part of a mighty plan of advance—that he may be indispensable to the building, though only as part of the sceffold which the great Architect will take down.
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