Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/171

Rh they who shall live through all this distress, and who then shall share in the triumph of God, and of His holy Church, catholic, apostolic, and Roman."

Conceptions of this kind are not limited to historians whose names have dropped out of remembrance, and to men who, while the drama of contemporary revolution is going on, play the part of a Greek chorus, telling the world of spectators what has been the divine purpose and what are the divine intentions; but we have lately had a professor of history setting forth conceptions essentially identical in nature. Here are his words:

It does not concern us here to seek a reconciliation of the seemingly incongruous ideas bracketed together in this paragraph—to ask how the results of gravitation, which acts with such uniformity that under given conditions its effect is calculable with certainty, can at the same time be regarded as the results of will, which we class apart because, as known in our experience, it is so irregular; or to ask how, if the course of human affairs is divinely predetermined just as material changes are, any distinction is to be drawn between that prevision of material changes which constitutes physical science and historical prevision: the reader may be left to evolve the obvious conclusion that either the current idea of physical causation has to be abandoned, or the current idea of will has to be abandoned. All which I need here call attention to, as indicating the general character of such historical