al way; he
pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements
of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the
bare chronicler's road so far as to declare, for example, the general
principle, inadequate and over-stated as it is, that 'religion and civil
government are the two points on which human things revolve,'--even this
was a clear step in advance. The dismissal of the long series of
emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to
show a ripe sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet's
expressions of 'the concatenation of the universe,' of the
interdependence of the parts of so vast a whole, of there coming no
great change without having its causes in foregoing centuries, and of
the true object of history being to observe, in connection with each
epoch, those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way for
great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more
immediately brought them to pass[39]--all these phrases seem to point to
a true and philosophic survey. But they end in themselves, and lead
nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and one-sided collection of facts.
The writer does not cautiously follow and feel after the successive
links, but forges and chooses and arrays them after a pattern of his
own, which was fixed independently of them. A scientific term or two is
not enough to disguise the purely theological essence of the treatise.

[Footnote 39: _Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle_, part iii. ch. ii.]

Montesquieu and Voltaire were both far enough removed from Bossuet's
point of view, and the _Spirit of Laws_ of the one, and the _Essay on
the Manners and Character of Nations_ of the other, mark a very
different way of considering history from the lofty and confident method
of the orthodox rhetorician. The _Spirit of Laws_ was published in 1748,
that is to say a couple of years before Turgot's Discourse at the
Sorbonne. Voltaire's _Essay on Manners_ did not come out until 1757, or
seven years later than the Discourse; but Voltaire himself has told us
that its composition dates from 1740, when he prepared this new
presentation of European history for the service of Madame du
Chatelet.[40] We may hence fairly consider the cardinal work of
Montesquieu, and the cardinal historical work of Voltaire, as virtually
belonging to the same time. And they possess a leading character in
common, which separates them both fr