y might get to speak of it
articulately, and draw inferences and profit from it; in this new
stage, History, we must say, babbles and flounders perhaps in a still
painfuller manner. Take, for example, the latest Form of speech we
have seen propounded on the subject as adequate to it, almost in these
months, by our worthy M. Roux, in his Histoire Parlementaire. The latest
and the strangest: that the French Revolution was a dead-lift effort,
after eighteen hundred years of preparation, to realise--the Christian
Religion! (Hist. Parl. Introd., i. 1 et seqq.) Unity, Indivisibility,
Brotherhood or Death did indeed stand printed on all Houses of the
Living; also, on Cemeteries, or Houses of the Dead, stood printed, by
order of Procureur Chaumette, Here is eternal Sleep: (Deux Amis,
xii. 78.) but a Christian Religion realised by the Guillotine and
Death-Eternal, 'is suspect to me,' as Robespierre was wont to say,
'm'est suspecte.'

Alas, no, M. Roux! A Gospel of Brotherhood, not according to any of the
Four old Evangelists, and calling on men to repent, and amend each his
own wicked existence, that they might be saved; but a Gospel rather, as
we often hint, according to a new Fifth Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling
on men to amend each the whole world's wicked existence, and be saved
by making the Constitution. A thing different and distant toto coelo, as
they say: the whole breadth of the sky, and further if possible!--It is
thus, however, that History, and indeed all human Speech and Reason does
yet, what Father Adam began life by doing: strive to name the new Things
it sees of Nature's producing,--often helplessly enough.

But what if History were to admit, for once, that all the Names and
Theorems yet known to her fall short? That this grand Product of Nature
was even grand, and new, in that it came not to range itself under old
recorded Laws-of-Nature at all; but to disclose new ones? In that case,
History renouncing the pretention to name it at present, will look
honestly at it, and name what she can of it! Any approximation to the
right Name has value: were the right name itself once here, the Thing is
known thenceforth; the Thing is then ours, and can be dealt with.

Now surely not realization, of Christianity, or of aught earthly, do we
discern in this Reign of Terror, in this French Revolution of which
it is the consummating. Destruction rather we discern--of all that was
destructible. It is as if Twenty-five millio