for a great transition; the many wheels of its intricate mechanism are beginning to revolve, and a complicated movement continually accelerated by fresh impulses, is bearing along the world from its wintry and torpid position, and bringing it under the influence of serener heavens and an awakening spring. All the genial powers of nature will be unlocked, and the better feelings that have long slumbered in the breast of man will be roused to life. True benevolence will come in the train of genuine Christianity; and mankind, in promoting the welfare of each other, will find that happiness which has so long escaped them. Evil, though it can never be entirely eradicated from human nature on this side of death, will yet be repressed in all its manifestations as soon as it presents itself, and the thoughts and endeavours of all will tend to heal the inevitable ills which flesh is heir to. Then will be the harvest of the moral world, and the seed of noble thoughts and deeds that once seemed lost, shall suddenly shoot forth, and ripen to maturity, and the success of wrong even in this world shall seem brief compared with the long ages that shall crown the efforts of wisdom and virtue. (M.) NOTES. NOTE A. Page 8. THE peculiar tenet of the school of Turgot, which embraces among its disciples, Condorcet and Madame de Stael, is what they term the indefinite perfectability of human nature; by which they imply its constant and necessary improvement. But as the situation of the world at present, and the records of history, are not altogether favourable to this opinion, they have adopted a theory by which these opposite appearances may be reconciled with their system. To account for the slow progress which mankind have made under the influence of this constantly propelling power, by which they are supposed to be borne along, they have recourse to the savage state, in its rudest forms, as the original condition of mankind; and from this point of extreme depression they are enabled to mark a considerable extent of ascent to the position which they now occupy. The Greeks are rather in the way of this theory, and the eminence which they attained in the arts by no means pleases them. These attainments they depreciate, and consider them, with Madame de Stael, merely as the seeds of civilization, which the winds were to scatter, and which were to produce a harvest in distant countries. The dark ages are a still greater difficulty; but Turgot discovered, that the human mind developed a force in the study of the scholastic dialectics, which it could have acquired in no other pursuit-a supposition which would be more plausible if those who took the lead at the revival of letters, or at the reformation, had been much versant in the scholastic theology; but the reverse was the cause; the reformers, and the restorers of letters, were the despisers of the schoolmen; and the subtlety, and the tension of mind, which is acquired in solving the enigmas of ontology, are the opposites of those mental habits which conduce to the detection of error, or the discovery of truth. Kings and priests, according to this theory, are the two evil powers, from whose malign influence has arisen every disaster that has befallen humanity, or every delay that has retarded its progress. They are like the old man of the sea upon the back of Sinbad, but the press is about to do the same good office for mankind that the juice of the grape did for the Arabian mariner. Kings and priests will speedily lose their hold of their victim; and the mind, freed from every impediment by the French revolution, will hold on its course, exempted from every |