o; and what are the
tendencies in us which, thus alternately predominating, give so
different a character to different periods of the human history; the
answer is not easy to be given summarily, for the generalisation which
it requires is almost beyond the compass of the human mind. Several
phenomena appear in each period, and it would be easy to give any one of
these as marking its tendency: as, for instance, we might describe one
period as having a tendency to despotism, and another to licentiousness:
but the true answer lies deeper, and can be only given by discovering
that common element in human nature which, in religion, in politics, in
philosophy, and in literature, being modified by the subject-matter of
each, assumes in each a different form, so that its own proper nature is
no longer to be recognized. Again, it would be an error to suppose that
either of the two tendencies which so affect the course of human affairs
were to be called simply bad or good. Each has its good and evil nicely
intermingled; and taking the highest good of each, it would be difficult
to say which was the more excellent;--taking the last corruption of
each, we could not determine which, was the more hateful. For so far as
we can trace back the manifold streams, flowing some from the eastern
mountains, and some from the western, to the highest springs from which
they rise, we find on the one side the ideas of truth and justice, on
the other those of beauty and love;--things so exalted, and so
inseparably united in the divine perfections, that to set either two
above the other were presumptuous and profane. Yet these most divine
things separated from each other, and defiled in their passage through
this lower world, do each assume a form in human nature of very great
evil: the exclusive and corrupted love of truth and justice becomes in
man selfish atheism; the exclusive and corrupted worship of beauty and
love becomes in man a bloody and a lying idolatry.

Such would be the general theory of the two great currents in which
human affairs may be said to have been successively drifting. But real
history, even the history of all mankind, and much more that of any
particular age or country, presents a picture far more complicated.
First, as to time: as the vessels in a harbour, and in the open sea
without it, may be seen swinging with the tide at the same moment in
opposite directions; the ebb has begun in the roadstead, while it is not
yet h