its unity. For these reasons we prefer the date of the call of Mahomet, in the fortieth year of his age, to any other date for the commencement of the Middle Ages.

The following is the note referred to in page 237:

This passage will, most probably, be misunderstood without an explanation. The Satan of modern and the Satan of ancient times are very different ideas. The popular Satan is a mediæval personage: there is no such being in the Old Testament. Selig Newman, a learned Jew, says, "The name Satan is applied to any angel of the Lord sent upon an errand of punishment; as the angel of the Lord who stood in the way for an adversary-literally, 'for a Satan' against Balaam." When the Lord himself is angry with David, he is called Satan, and tempts him to number the people. (II. Sam., 24-1, and I. Chron., 21-1, compared.) Dr. S. Clarke says of these passages, "God's moving, Satan's provoking, and David's distrustful heart tempting, all mean the same thing;" and Bishop Horne says of them, "Nothing is more common with the sacred writers than to represent God as doing that which he permits to be done." And are the sacred writers wrong in so doing, and Bishop Horne right in guarding us against the habits of sacred writers? When St. Paul essayed to go into Bithynia, we are told that the Holy Spirit hindered him; but when he essayed again and again to go into Thessalonica, we are told that Satan hindered him. The difference we are left to imagine; but no doubt both hindrances were equally providential. Moses ascribes everything to God that moderns ascribe to Satan; as, for instance, the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, and the hearts of the Egyptians and Canaanites. It is the Theology of the whole of the Old Testament, and, to a considerable extent also, of the New. The moderns have separated the two principles of Law and Liberty, or Law and Opposition to Law-the ancients regarded them as one bipolarised; and this ancient idea is the analogue of planetary life, which is night on one side and day on the other, day and night chasing each other round the planet for ever, and each being a Satan —that is, an antagonist or opposition-to the other. For this reason, no doubt, Lucifer, or the Light-bringer, is one of the names of Satan.

The reign of Liberty begins with him. He antagonises Law, and introduces Evil, the beginning of the struggle of the free with the absolute; and Law also antagonises Liberty, resists, and thwarts, and persecutes it, until the final reconciliation. Each is a Satan to the other, and each is evil in one aspect and good in another; relatively good and evil, but both absolutely good; for there is no absolute evil in God's dominions. Law, however, being the representative of order and unity, is also the general representative of God; but not always, for this would desecrate the principle of Liberty. Therefore, Liberty is represented sometimes as Divine, and Law as a Satan to it. "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage," or the Law of Moses. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty." The Law of Liberty is the final reconciliation of the two antagonistic principles, which struggle as if, without absolutely being, enemies in the times of progression and development. Hence judgments, floods, earthquakes, revolutions, famines, pestilences, &c., are ascribed to God or Satan, according to the position from which they are viewed. But in either case they are alike providential, and though relatively evil, are absolutely and ultimately good. The Satan of Job not only inflicts disease on the human body, but raises a hurricane in the atmosphere. He has the elements of Nature at his command. In other words, the spirit of our planet, and, by analogy, of all planets, is, like a planet, bipolar, light and dark; a Janus, bifacial, absolute, and free, and therefore seemingly contradictory and antagonistic. But this very antagonism is planetary life, good or evil, according to its relationship with something else.

R

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The Middle or Dark Ages;

OR,

THE REIGN OF ROMAN UNION AND FEUDAL DISPERSION, THE ROCK AND THE SAND OF THE NEW TRILOGUE,* LASTING TILL THE REVIVAL OF THE GREEK MISSIONS IN THE RENAISSANCE, AND THE REVIVAL OF THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN MISSION IN THE REFORMATION.

SCENE FOURTH.

THE HIGH PRIEST ON THE BRIDGE AND THE NEW PROPHET OF THE

WILDERNESS.

TIME-From A.D. 532 or 608 to the Renaissance or Reformation.

WE are now arrived at the Third Act of the Christian Drama, and as we are still in the midst of the Third Act of the Great Drama of Civilisation, the two Dramas are now united, and proceed co-ordinately, struggling and sympathising, resisting and embracing, neutralising and combining with each other, alternately. The two great streams are now become one, and the river of Paganism has lost

* As Rome belongs to both worlds, the ancient and the modern, and is the bridge between them, its mission is double. It has, there fore, two histories, two empires, and two classical languages-Latin and Italian. By this duplication it ends one trilogue and begins another it is the end of the ancient and beginning of modern

its name, though its waters are preserved in the current of the church. An awful work of destruction has been accomplished. Rome has been pillaged and burnt, its inhabitants massacred or dispersed, and the feeble remnant living amid the ruins of palaces and temples, baths and amphitheatres, and monuments innumerable, the wonders of the present age, are daily witnesses of a desert within and without the walls, which still, even to this day, remains to attest the magnitude and resistless force of the desolating power. And that desert how singularly emblematical it now tells, on a map of the Central City, the fate of the whole of the Empire, which it represents! With a plan of Rome before him, let the reader only draw a line across it, from the south-east to the north-west, which is the zodiacal course of the movement of civilisation, and he will find that exactly in that line has the desolation moved, laying waste the whole of the eastern and southern half, and preserving the northern and western,

times. Its absolutism, however, is different from that of Jewism, being more in advance. It is not prological, but paralogical; that is, it goes beyond, or outstrips and exceeds, logic by a certain wild and romantic extravagance. We have already shown, in our third Prologue, that it is of the nature of a third act of a regular pentalogical Drama to form a pivot, and as if it were the fulcrum of the two arms of a balance. We are now beginning to pass that pivot, from one side to the other. The new paralogical mission of Rome in the West, however, is immediately balanced by the new prological mission of Mahomet in the East, equally extravagant, but received by dictation from an Absolute Spirit.

which is now the habitable portion of Rome within the walls. By an edict of the Emperor Caracalla, confirmed by other Emperors in succession, the whole Roman Empire was declared to be the city, and thus the metropolis became as it were a model of the Empire; and here in the model, by the hand of a mysterious directing agent, we have a representation in miniature of the ruin that visited the stupendous whole. It is in the north-western corner of Rome, that St. Peter's, and the Vatican, and the Castle of St. Angelo, are erected, as if driven by the tide of the desolating current to seek for shelter in the very farthest extremity of the huge waste. The people followed the church, and its protector, and left the south-east a heap of ruins, the type of the Orient wilderness of the ruptured Empire. In this line of movement, the Pontifex Maximus completed his bridge and walked westward over it, and left the East to the hope of the future and the destiny of the church. The last arch was begun by Gregory the Great, in the Augustine Mission to England, by the annexation of which to the Spiritual Empire the Papal church arrived at the end of the Roman world, and planted its banners on the scene of the last act of the Pentalogical Drama,

The Roman Pontiff is by name a Bridgemaker. "Pontifex Maximus" is, by interpretation, "The Supreme Bridgemaker"-the greatest of all bridgemakers, and the name has a similar meaning in Greek -Gephuropoios. The Pons Sublicius was formerly