try to explain too often all the facts which they meet by
the very few laws which they know; and especially moral phaenomena by
physical, or at least economic laws. There is an excuse for this last
error. Much which was thought, a few centuries since, to belong to the
spiritual world, is now found to belong to the material; and the
physician is consulted, where the exorcist used to be called in. But it
is a somewhat hasty corollary therefrom, and one not likely to find
favour in this University, that moral laws and spiritual agencies have
nothing at all to do with the history of the human race. We shall not be
inclined here, I trust, to explain (as some one tried to do lately) the
Crusades by a hypothesis of over-stocked labour-markets on the Continent.

Neither, again, shall we be inclined to class those same Crusades among
'popular delusions,' and mere outbursts of folly and madness. This is a
very easy, and I am sorry to say, a very common method of disposing of
facts which will not fit into the theory, too common of late, that need
and greed have been always, and always ought to be, the chief motives of
mankind. Need and greed, heaven knows, are powerful enough: but I think
that he who has something nobler in himself than need and greed, will
have eyes to discern something nobler than them, in the most fantastic
superstitions, in the most ferocious outbursts, of the most untutored
masses. Thank God, that those who preach the opposite doctrine belie it
so often by a happy inconsistency; that he who declares self-interest to
be the mainspring of the world, can live a life of virtuous
self-sacrifice; that he who denies, with Spinoza, the existence of free-
will, can disprove his own theory, by willing, like Spinoza, amid all the
temptations of the world, to live a life worthy of a Roman Stoic; and
that he who represents men as the puppets of material circumstance, and
who therefore has no logical right either to praise virtue, or to blame
vice, can shew, by a healthy admiration of the former, a healthy scorn of
the latter, how little his heart has been corrupted by the eidola specus,
the phantoms of the study, which have oppressed his brain. But though
men are often, thank heaven, better than their doctrines, yet the
goodness of the man does not make his doctrine good; and it is immoral as
well as unphilosophical to call a thing hard names simply because it
cannot be fitted into our theory of the universe. Immor