THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH 585
suppressed, to the present year. Adams called the Christian faith a horrid blasphemy. Of Jefferson \ve are assured that, if not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence; and he hoped that the French arms "would bring at length kings, nobles, and priests to the scaffolds \vhich they have been so long deluging with human blood." If Calvin prompted the Revolution, it was after he had suffered from contact with Tom Paine; and we must make room for other influences which, in that generation, swayed the world from the rising to the setting sun. It was an age of faith in the secular sense described by Guizot: "C'était un siècle ardent et sincère, un siècle plein de foi et d'enthousiasme. II a eu foi dans la vérité, car il lui a reconnu Ie droit de régner." In point both of principle and policy, Mr. Bryce does \vell to load the scale that is not his own, and to let the jurist within him sometimes mask the philosophic politician. I have to speak of him not as a political reasoner or as an observer of life in motion, but only in the character which he assiduously lays aside. If he had guarded less against his own historic faculty, and had allowed space to take up neglected threads, he would have had to expose the boundless innovation, the un- fathomed gulf produced by American independence, and there would be no opening to back the Jeffersonian shears against the darning-needle of the great chief-justice. My misgiving lies in the line of thought of Riehl and the elder Cherbuliez. The first of those eminent conservatives writes: "Die Extreme, nicht deren Vermittelungen und Abschwächungen, deuten die Zukunft vor." The Genevese has just the same remark: "Les idées n'ont jamais plus de puissance que sous leur forme la plus abstraite. Les idées abstraites ant plus remué Ie monde, eUes ant causé plus de révolutions et laissé plus de traces durables que les idées pratiques." Lassalle says, " Kein Einzelner denkt mit der Consequenz eines V olksgeistes." Schelling may help us over the parting ways: "Der erzeugte Gedanke ist eine unabhängige Macht, für sich fortwirkend, ja, in cler menschlichen Seele, so anwachsend, dass er seine
