Page:History of Freedom.djvu/639

 HISTORICAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE 595

ever, Dr. Flint, in his agreement with Renouvier, is not eager to fight for his cause, and speaks with a less jubilant certitude. He is able to conceive that providence may. attain its end \vithout the condition of progress, that the divine scheme would not be frustrated if the world, governed by omnipotent \visdom, became steadily worse. Assuming progress as a fact, if not a la\v, there comes the question wherein it consists, how it is measured, where is its goal. Not religion, for the Middle Ages are an epoch of decline. Catholicism has since lost so much ground as to nullify the theories of Bossuet; whilst Pro- testantism never succeeded in France, either after the Reformation, when it ought to have prevailed, nor after the Revolution, when it ought not. The failure to establish the Protestant Church on the ruins of the old régÙlle, to which Quinet attributes the breakdown of the Revolution, and \vhich Napoleon regretted almost in the - era of his concordat, is explained by Mr. Flint on the ground that Protestants were in a -minority. But so they \vere in and after the wars of religion; and it is not apparent \vhy a philosopher who does not prefer orthodoxy to liberty should complain that they achieved nothing better than toleration. He disproves Bossuet's view by that process of deliverance from the Church which is the note of recent centuries, and from which there is no going back. On the future I will not enlarge, because I am \vriting at present in the HISTORICAL, not the PRO- PHETICAL, REVIEW. But some things \vere not so clear in France in 1679 as they are now at Edinburgh. The predominance of Protestant power was not foreseen, except by those who disputed whether Rome would perish in I 7 10 or about 172 o. The destined power of science to act upon religion had not been proved by Ne\vton or Simon. No man was able to forecast the future experience of America, or to be sure that observations made under the reign of authority would be confirmed by the reign of freedom. If the end be not religion, is it morality, humanity, civilisation, knowledge? In the German chapters of