show with equal ease that the world is, or that it is not, under a moral government; that mankind has always been progressive, or always stationary, or steadily degenerating. No testimony can be trusted. Patriots, politicians, and observers all manipulate facts, and philosophers are worst of all. He objects to all historical theories because they 'vitiate the observation of facts, without which the speculations are not worth the paper on which they are written.' But observation of facts is precarious. Whenever he has found an authentic explanation of some difficulty, it has 'almost invariably' turned out that the true motive of the actors had been entirely misunderstood. If so, it would seem we must indefinitely postpone all speculation and confine ourselves to the barest external circumstances. These rather impulsive assertions, however, did not correspond to his practice and, indeed, would justify the conception of history most opposed to his own. The denial that we can prove the race to be under moral government is followed by the assertion that history does prove one, and only one, lesson—the lesson that the world is 'built somehow on moral foundations'; that in the long-run it will be well with the good and ill with the wicked.
